Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Just because a core bid of the Environmental Humanities-that humanistic approaches and insights can illuminate ecological problems and challenges-seems convincing to me doesn't mean I'm not kept awake at night wondering what in the world literary-cultural analysis can possibly bring to a planet embroiled in climactic catastrophe.For ecocritics of my sort, those who lose sleep to this worry, Min Hyoung Song has a welcome rejoinder: studying literature ma ers now more than ever because it has the potential to sustain a ention, a practice that Song claims can nurture consequential forms of human agency in this time of ever-accelerating climate crisis.Song keys this work of sustaining a ention above all to what he terms "climate lyricism," a mode that, unspooling anthropocentric idioms so as to blur human/nonhuman di erences, entails both "an active mode of making" and "an active mode of a ending" (3).Dissatis ed with the strategies and tendencies on o er in much narrative ction, especially when they promise resolution, Song prefers the a ordances found in the lyric,
Source: American Literary History
DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajaf019
Author: Mark Simpson
Institution: University of Alberta
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411224672