Environmental humanities on the brink : the vanitas hypothesis /
In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amidst spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls, shells...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Stanford, California :
Stanford University Press,
[2023].
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| Summary: | In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amidst spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th 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 fairy tale, 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. Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory, this book argues we ought to keep reading even by the flickering light of extinction. |
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| Physical Description: | vi, 170 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781503630505 1503630501 9781503638631 1503638634 |