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Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures
Karen Laura Thornber
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East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Karen Laura Thornber calls ecoambiguity—the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment.
Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.
Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Dedication
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Acknowledgments
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Contents
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Conventions
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INTRODUCTION: Environments, Environmental Ambiguities, and Literatures
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Changing Environments
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Environmental Ambiguity
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Environments of Literature
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Changing Environments of Literature
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Ecoambiguity
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ONE / Environmental Degradation and Literature in East Asia
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Environmental Degradation in China
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Chinese Literature and Environmental Degradation
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Environmental Degradation in Preindustrial Korea and Japan
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Environmental Degradation in Modern Japan
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Japanese Literature and Environmental Degradation
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Environmental Degradation in Modern Korea
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Korean Literature and Environmental Degradation
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Environmental Degradation in Taiwan
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Taiwanese Literature and Environmental Degradation
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PART 1
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TWO / Accentuating Ambivalence
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Ambivalence
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Reconceptualizing Use
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Suffering Worlds
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Threatened Worlds
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Disappearing Worlds
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Protesting Protection
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Navigating Disparate Attitudes
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THREE / Underlining Uncertainty
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Informational Ambiguity
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The Unknown and Unknowable
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Making Sense of Symptoms
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Assessing Damage
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Assessing Collateral Nonhuman Damage
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Questioning Nonhuman Resilience
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Ambiguous Futures
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FOUR / Capitalizing on Contradiction
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Determining Cause, Assessing Accountability
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Among People
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Necessity and Accountability
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Human, Nonhuman, or Both
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Contradictions: Trading Off
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Decreasing Human Numbers, Helping Environments
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Increasing Human Numbers, Harming People and Environments
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Helping Environments, Harming Environments
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Assessing Assessments of Behaviors
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Standards
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Physical Standards
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Social and Temporal Standards
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PART II
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FIVE / Acquiescing
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Myopia and Myopic Hyperopia
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Accepting Environmental Degradation
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Necessity, Compulsion, and Actively Damaging Environments
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Denying Disavowals
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Arresting Behaviors
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SIX / Illusions and Delusions
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Physically and Conceptually Manipulating Environments
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Gaping Chasms
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Signifying Indifference
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Culture, Civilization, and Damaged Environments
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SEVEN / Green Paradoxes
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Injurious Fascination
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Admiring ecosystems, Longing for Control
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Green Hypocrisy
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Notes
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Works Cited
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2012
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-02814-6 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-11806-9 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-00386-0 (audio download)