The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Wasteland Aesthetics

Bibliographic Data

ID8091039
AuthorsAidan Tynan (0000-0003-0548-2013, corresponding author)
Year2020
Publication date2020-08-18
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDesert in Modern Literature and Philosophy (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1515/9781474443371
OpenAlexW4285658653
Open LibraryOL34754201M
ISBN9781474443371
LanguageEN
Citations received16

Shows how philosophers from Nietzsche to Deleuze have used the figure of the desert to theorise space and place Uses the figure of the desert to provide an aesthetic theory of modernity Rethinks and challenges key assumptions of ecocriticism Offers readings of the most significant literary deserts using an innovative and rigorous theoretical framework Provides an original account of the Anthropocene from a cultural perspective Read an interview between Aiden Tynan and Crosscurrents series editor Christopher Watkin Aidan Tynan provocatively rethinks some of the core assumptions of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Showing the significance of deserts and wastelands in literature since the Romantics, he argues that the desert has served to articulate anxieties over the cultural significance of space in the Anthropocene. From imperial travel writing to postmodernism, from the Old Testament to salvagepunk, the desert has been a terrain of desire over which the Western imagination of space and place has ranged. As our planetary ecological crisis heads in increasingly catastrophic directions, this critique of the figure of the desert in literature, philosophy and wider culture can help us map an environmental affect that finds itself both attracted to and repelled by arid, depopulated and barren landscapes of various kinds. Philosophers crucial to understanding our contemporary environmental condition make extensive use of the desert as a conceptual topography, a place of thought. Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity. Tynan engages this philosophical work through a range of 20th and 21st century art and literature, and provides new interpretations of the most significant literary deserts from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo

Desert (philosophy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Geography · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Literature · Philosophy

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