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Annotated EcoArt Reading List

Books primarily on the history of the ecology movement, including: feminist writings about our relationship with nature; our historical and present use of language and how it rigidifies our thinking about nature and culture; our changing view of nature over time; and readings on visual art and writing that highlight activist post-modern art. I read these books in an attempt to better understand our relationship with nature through language and the history of scientific thought, and to consider the role of wonder and sensuousness as a possible way to reshape this experience.

Abram, David. The Spell Of The Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

The author "explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which - even at its most abstract - echoes the calls and cries of the earth."

Bennett, Jane, and William Chaloupka, editors. In The Nature Of Things: Language, Politics, And The Environment. Minneapolis, University Of Minnesota Press, 1993.

This book addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language. The theoretical approaches of the contributors represent both modernist and postmodernist positions, including feminist theory, critical theory, Marxism, science fiction, theology, and botany.

Borror, Donald J. Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, eleventh edition. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1971.

"Compiled from the Greek, Latin, and other languages, with special reference to biological terms and scientific names."

Corrin, Lisa G., ed. Mining The Museum: An Installation By Fred Wilson. New York: The New Press, 1994.

"With his startling use of juxtaposition and irony, Fred Wilson, an artist of African-American and Carib descent, 'mined' the collection of a traditional historical society and designed an installation that illustrated the complicity of museum practices in upholding racism.

Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders And The Order Of Nature: 1150-1750. Zone Books, 1998.

This Book is "about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions - these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. [The authors] explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals.

Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper And Row Publishers, 1989.

"In a surprising narrative, Annie Dillard describes the working life of a writer. These are vivid and ironic encounters at the desk. They illuminate, in metaphor after metaphor, any life of dedication, absurdity, and daring - any life at the edge."

Eco, Umberto. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

This work unlocks the "riddles of history in an exploration of the 'linguistics of the lunatic,' stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the 'force of the false,' Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history."

Fisher, Philip. Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

"This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences. In three instructive instances - a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows - Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought."

Friedman, Ken, editor. The Fluxus Reader. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998.

"Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus had become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic experimentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s', Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video."

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, editors. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: The University Of Georgia Press, 1996.

Ecocritics ask questions like the following: How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? How can we characterize nature writing as a genre? In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category? Do men write about nature differently than women do? In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind's relationship to the natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture?

Grande, John K., Balance: Art And Nature. Cheektowaga: Black Rose Books, 1994.

This book "questions the invasion of the creative process by institutional and market forces and marks a return to direct experience with nature as a source of creativity."

-------------. Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists. Cheektowaga: Black Rose Books, 1998.

Topics in this book include: the effects of the internet on museums and education; artists in a nature park; agriculture as art; art after the demise of communism; artists' response to a site first colonized by the Jesuits in the north; the artist's response to breast cancer; to animal rights; to violence and children's toys; to art and illness.

Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge: New York, 1991.

Haraway, as a leading feminist writer trained in science, uncovers the historical and present-day scientific practices steeped in patriarchy. She focuses on nature versus culture issues from the perspective of primate/human studies done by mostly wealthy white male scientists who intend to manipulate human society through their "findings."

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University Of Chicago Press, 1980.

The authors assert that metaphor is basic to our everyday thought process and that they affect the ways in which we perceive, think, and act. Reality itself is defined by metaphor, and as metaphors very from culture to culture, so do the realities they define. This thought provoking book uncovers assumptions we hold about objectivity, subjectivity, science and, ultimately, how we think of ourselves in relationship to nature.

Lippard, Lucy. Eva Hesse. New York, New York University Press, 1976.

"Between the fall of 1965 and her death at thirty-four in May 1970, Eva Hesse made some 70 sculptures and many more drawings which have assured her place as a major artist." Here, author Lippard not only gives an insightful biography of a determined young artist, she develops a critical analysis of the entire body of Hesse's work.

Monmonier, Mark. How To Lie With Maps. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991.

This book explains how individual cartographers, corporations, and government institutions (especially the military) use the elements in map making to convey information that is skewed to present information, or propaganda, to an unsuspecting public.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea Of Wilderness: From Prehistory To The Age Of Ecology. Yale University Press, 1991.

The author says: "This book is rooted in my conviction that reason influences cultural outcomes. [It] is therefore subversive, for I have assumed that what the members of a democratic society think ultimately makes a difference and that insofar as our ideals are warranted by evidence and argument, then the natural and cultural worlds can coexist harmoniously."

Plumwood, Val. Feminism And The Mastery Of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

"Ecofeminism has contributed a great deal both to activist struggle and to theorising links between women's oppression and the domination of nature.... In some versions it has engaged with all four forms of exploitation encompassed in race, class, gender and nature. At the same time, ecofeminism has been stereotyped in some quarters both as theoretically weak and as doubtfully liberated....My objective in this book is to help develop an environmental feminism that can be termed a critical ecological feminism, one which is thoroughly compatible with and can be strongly based in feminist theory."

Shepard, Paul. Nature And Madness. Athens and London, The University Of Georgia Press, 1982.

Drawing upon his research in the fields of biology, genetics, zoology, anthropology, psychology, ethology, history, theology, poetics, and myth, the author explores the reasons why western humans do so much harm to one another and the earth. Shepard offers us a harmonious alternative.

Thomas, Lewis. Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes Of A Word-Watcher. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1990.

Lewis Thomas, in writing that is fascinating, lucid, and thought-provoking, takes up the origin of words, the development of language, and the light that words - simple but important words - shed on the history of [humankind]."

Wilson, Edward O., and Stephen R. Kellert, editors. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1993.

'Biophilia" is a term which describes what E. O. Wilson believes is our innate affinity for the natural world. This book examines how our tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes might be a biologically based need, integral to our development as individuals and as a species.

Wolff, Janet. The Social Production Of Art, second edition. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

"Art is a social product. This book attempts to show systematically the various ways in which the arts can adequately be understood only in a sociological perspective. It argues against the romantic and mystical notion of art as the creation of 'genius,' transcending existence, society and time, and argues that it is rather the complex construction of a number of real, historical factors."

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History Of Ecological Ideas, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

The author offers a "wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past. [He] traces the origins of the concept, discusses the thinkers who have shaped it, and shows how it in turn has shaped the modern perception of our place in nature. Our view of the living world is a product of culture, and the development of ecology since the eighteenth century has closely reflected society's changing concerns."

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