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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis

Environmental Humanities on the Brink: The Vanitas Hypothesis

Bruyere, Vincent

Paperback

Art Criticism & TheoryLiterary Criticism

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ISBN10: 1503638634
ISBN13: 9781503638631
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: Sep 19 2023
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.90
Language: English

In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse.

The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls, shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues. Each chapter places a vanitas motif--canvas, debris, toxics, paper, ark, meat, and light--in conversation with stories and images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat.

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