rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Stone
    sub title: an ecology of the inhuman
  name:
    name part: Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mnu
    date issued: 2015
    copyright date: 2015
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: 366 pages ; 23 cm.
  abstract: Stone maps the force, vivacity and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real," blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept, "Geophilia," "Time," "Force" and "Soul," Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland, a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient."
  table of contents: Contents Introduction: Stories of Stone -- Geophilia: The Love of Stone -- Excursus: The Weight of the Past -- Time: The Insistence of Stone -- Excursus: A Heart Unknown -- Force: The Adventure of Stone -- Excursus: Geologic -- Soul: The Life of Stone -- Afterword: Iceland -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
  note: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: Nature
    topic: Religious aspects
  subject:
    topic: Stone
    topic: Miscellanea
  subject:
    topic: Ecology
    topic: Philosophy
  subject:
    topic: Literature, Medieval
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: PHILOSOPHY / General
  subject:
    topic: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
  subject:
    topic: HISTORY / Medieval
  classification: BD581 .C64 2015
  classification: 113
  identifier: 9780816692576
  identifier: 0816692572
  identifier: 9780816692620
  identifier: 0816692629
  identifier: 2014045916
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 150126
    record change date: 20151105213307.0
    record identifier: in00003529926