The influence of Heidegger's on current thought has been pervasive. In reaction to Enlightenment ideas, he presents a view of the modern world as destructive of nature, community, tradition, individuality, and more. His writings have influenced such central social and literary thinkers as Derrida and Foucault. This volume is the first thorough introduction to his work on language and literature. Heidegger's reputation for being difficult has scared off many who would have otherwise profited from a knowledge of his work. This (...) guide is written with these people in mind. It is "student-friendly" and presents Heidegger's ideas in a clear and comprehensible manner. Understanding Heidegger is essential for anyone who wants to understand current literary theory, and this guide is essential for anyone seeking to understand Heidegger. (shrink)

Since the publication of his mammoth work, _Being and Time_, Martin Heidegger has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought, and is a key influence for modern literary and cultural theory. This guidebook provides an ideal entry-point for readers new to Heidegger, outlining such issues and concepts as: the limits of 'theory' the history of being the origin of the work of art language the literary work poetry and the political Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. Fully updated throughout (...) and featuring a new section on enviromental thought and ecocriticism, this guidebook clearly and concisely introduces Heidegger's crucial work relating to art, language and poetry, and outlines his continuing influence on critical theory. (shrink)

Blanchot's work may at first seem remote from any sort of environmentalist thinking. While elements of his work share with Levinas and Heidegger a problematic privileging of the human, Blanchot nevertheless offers the basis of what might be seen as a timely ‘deeper ecological’ thinking, one that can engage the destructive anthropocentrism of Western thought and tradition in the very minutiae of its literary and philosophical texts. Unlike in much ‘green’ philosophy, no concept of nature or earth serves as foundation (...) for Blanchot's thought. He is engaged by the ‘impossible’ as that which is not a matter of human power or decision, affirmed in both its ethical force and its contestation of dominant and appropriative conceptions of knowledge, rationality and invention. A comparison is offered between Max Oelschlager's representative ecocritical essay ‘Earth-Talk: Conservation and Ecology’, with its romantic attempt to find and celebrate modes of unalienated or ‘natural’ language, and Blanchot's practice of what can be seen as a more radical and questioning ‘ecology’ based on almost opposite conceptions. (shrink)

This review article offers an introductory overview of a distinctive broadly ‘deconstructive’ body of work which deserves to be more widely known. Two books in particular, by Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, are an especial focus, with their uncompromising readings of many of the assumptions and evasions in the environmental humanities. These are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London, Routledge, 2012), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Timothy Clark HEIDEGGER, DERRIDA, AND THE GREEK LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY The question "What is philosophy?" is not simply one question among others. Its status involves the questioner at once in a series of peculiar problems. The question "What is chemistry?" (for instance) would surely seem to admit of an answer. Even if there were a dispute about the wording of a definition, the general region to which the question (...) directs us seems relatively secure. "What is chemistry?" asks about the essence of a physical science and, as a consequence, the questioner will be situated in the realm of the philosophy of science. "What is philosophy?" however, can make no such leap. A "philosophy of philosophy " is simply tantamount to more philosophy. The question of philosophy 's essence can only be posed within philosophy. Moreover, would not this very question of an essence ofphilosophy be determined in advance by an understanding of "essence" by philosophy, which thus seems remorselessly to encompass the borders of that which might try to enclose it? The mode of questioning on the (impossible?) borders of philosophical discourse is the site of Martin Heidegger's so-called overcoming of Western Metaphysics. More recently, Jacques Derrida has intensified the mode of borderline questioning, engaging himself in both a radicalization and displacement of Heideggerian questions. Derrida writes, in "Violence and Metaphysics" (1964), "The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor a historicism. It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium."1 Derrida continues to discuss Husserlian phenomenology and the thought of Heidegger in terms of their insistence on 75 76Philosophy and Literature conceiving philosophy according to its Greek impetus. If something is to transpire in the traditions of philosophy, its origin "will have to be summoned forth and adhered to as rigorously as possible" (p. 81). The specific "event" to be attended to will be what Derrida, after Heidegger, describes as the determination ofbeing as presence. This, it is argued, is constitutive in respect of philosophy and all the regional disciplines it governs. Needless to say "the determination of being as presence" demands considerable explication. The Greek nature of philosophy is discussed by Heidegger in the lecture, "What is Philosophy?"2 The question raises the problem of philosophy 's relation to its limits. Tb ask the question "What is Philosophy?" is not to step outside thought to some "metaphilosophical" realm. It is to be already standing in Greece. What is specifically Greek and decisive, in fact, is the very mode of the question ''What is XT' itself: "But not only what is in question —philosophy— is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek. We ask, "what is that—" (p. 35). The Greek mode of questioning something as to its whatness {ti estin?, "what is it?") has now become thoroughly familiar. Its novelty and Greek source have become obscured: "It is this form of questioning which Socrates, Plato, and Aristode developed. They ask, for example, What is the beautiful? What is knowledge?'..." (p. 37). Heidegger's characterization of the question, ti estin?, as decisively Greek must be distinguished from Edmund Husserl's apparently similar description of the fundamentally Greek nature of philosophy. Husserl characterized the theoretical relation to the world as a legacy which has largely determined Western Europe and, indeed, the modern world itself, a determination most palpable in the proliferation of the various sciences. The theoretical attitude is one of pure curiosity towards entities : "man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher."3 Moreover, the devotion to pure theoria builds up a body of disinterested knowledge in which others may participate and to which they may add. A universal culture, a project traversing individual and national difference, comes into being. The Greek philosopher embodied, for the first time, a type ofhumanity and culture to which the European world still belongs. Husserl thus underlines the huge stakes in so little a question as the "What is it?"//i estin... (shrink)

In 66 CE, the emperor Nero crowned the Parthian prince Tiridates I king of Armenia before the Roman people in the Forum Romanum. Much scholarship on Roman interactions with Parthia or Armenia focuses on histories of military conflict or diplomatic negotiation. Ritual and ceremonial evidence, however, is often taken for granted. This article uses the coronation to highlight a different way in which Rome articulated its relations with Parthia and Armenia to domestic and foreign audiences. It will show how Nero (...) and his regime used the art of public spectacle to project an image of Roman superiority over Parthia and Armenia in spite of Roman military losses in the recent Armenian war. Tiridates, a Parthian prince and a brother of the Parthian king of kings, traveled to Rome to be crowned the first king of Armenia from the Parthian royal family. To receive this title, Tiridates passed by several monuments to Augustan triumphs over Parthia and Armenia in the Forum. He was also surrounded by a group of Roman citizens, who watched him as they would have watched a defeated foreign leader in a triumph. At the culmination of the ceremony, Tiridates performed proskynesis before Nero at the rostra Augusti and was granted his crown. Through Augustus’ monuments, the collective viewing of Tiridates, and his acts of public submission and deference to Nero, the crowning intimated a new narrative about the state of Roman-Parthian/armenian relations. While Augustus had represented Parthian and Armenian defeat in art, Nero had compelled a representative of both Parthia and Armenia to come to Rome and kneel before the emperor. Both states were now subservient to Rome, which remained the dominant power in the East. (shrink)

This paper offers an anxious survey of factors inducing boredom or indifference in the readership of environmental writing and criticism. The first is the inertia of limited assumptions in writers and critics about how to engage readers’ attention, with inadequate ideas of what ‘genuine reading’ would be. Secondly and more insidiously, modern readers are usually now immersed in consumerist cultural contexts actively geared to encourage boredom as a market force. Reduced thresholds of attention become effectively a political agent, usually a (...) reactionary one. Next the question is asked: is ‘the reader’ a unified subject? That is, how far are environmental texts and fears unwittingly appealing to unacknowledged fantasies of violence and harm? A final threat to readerly engagement with environmental criticism in particular is that, as the conditions of the ‘Anthropocene’ worsen, just to engage more reading and readers on environmental issues comes to seem less and less adequate, even evasive, an academic theatre only of performing opinions. (shrink)