University of Chicago Press Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens′s Birds

The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens’s evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a “nonrepresentational” conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens’s poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. Ecological Poetics is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology. Review "In this remarkable and elegant book, Wolfe achieves a stunning account of the inhumanness, the 'strange planetary impersonality' of Stevens's poetry. Ecological Poetics carves out a new space for study within the general field of ecopoetics, focusing on a kind of poetry that reproduces rather than represents the peculiar logic of many biological, physical, and computational systems. Wolfe delivers a powerful new engine for thought, one that we can add to our repertoires of critical ideas and methods and apply to the larger cultural topic of environmentality."--Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan "The Stevens that emerges in Ecological Poetics is a new and very different animal from the one we thought we knew. We come to understand him as concerned with the embodied, the finite, the fragile, and the concrete, rather than preoccupied with abstract concepts and an idealist aesthetics. Through a series of excellent close readings, especially of his later poems, Stevens becomes the thinker to help us understand the vertiginous logic of the Anthropocene. Wolfe gives us a philosophy of ecological poetics whose ultimate stakes are both ethical and political, instructing us in how we might think poetically in order to effectively resist the destruction of life forms."--Branka Arsic, Columbia University About the Author Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University. He is the author of five books, most recently, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame.