TY - BOOK AU - Houser,Heather TI - Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect T2 - Literature Now SN - 9780231165143 AV - PS169.E25 H68 2014 U1 - 810.936 23 PY - 2014///] CY - New York, NY : PB - Columbia University Press, KW - American fiction KW - 20th century KW - History and criticism KW - American literature KW - Diseases in literature KW - Ecocriticism KW - Environmentalism in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; 1. Ecosickness --; 2. AIDS Memoirs out of the City: Discordant Natures --; 3. Richard Powers's Strange Wonder --; 4. Infinite Jest's environmental Case for Disgust --; 5. The Anxiety of Intervention in Leslie Marmon Silko and Marge Piercy --; Conclusion: How Does It Feel? --; Notes --; Works Cited --; Index; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between these forms of threat and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction establishes that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical dilemmas through data alone and must call on the sometimes surprising emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. In chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it. The study builds the connective tissue between contemporary literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities. It also positions ecosickness fiction relative to emergent forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Houser models an approach to contemporary fiction as a laboratory for affective changes that spark or squelch ethical projects UR - https://doi.org/10.7312/hous16514 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780231537360 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780231537360/original ER -