“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, September 16, 2010

Tim's Conference Notes

The conference forum isn't letting me post right now so I'll post my notes here fyi.

Values of environmental writing
Timothy Morton

Looking for inspiration in strange places.
Evolution, ecosystem: interconnected in time and space
Trying to evoke the reality of interconnectedness (ecosystem on the program)
Scale (hyperobjects, decentering), habitats (and the unheimlich)
Openness of art has a shot at doing this
Cocteau Twins: environmental form. The timbral
Irony--subject is included (Wordsworth poems). Not that the subject constructs her world or that the world lights up because of the presence of a human subject--no, in fact the absence of this is why there IS irony
The uncanny: strange strangers. Kathleen Jamie, “The Tay Moses”
Coexistence, logos (mesh), as uncanny
Heidegger, human being as uncanny
Horror, gothic, melancholy
Inspiration as happy happy face or as awakening us
Breathing in, spirit(ual)
Unhomely—homelessness
Weird picaresque realism--could be comedy, tragedy
Not a Burkean nor a Kantian but a Longinian sublime

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