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Planting the Anthropocene

Rhetorics of Natureculture

by Jennifer Clary-Lemon

Paperback Price $28.95
Ebook Price $23.95
30-day ebook rental price $11.50

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Planting the Anthropocene reads interdisciplinary conversations on affect, ecocriticism, science studies, and new materialism through an entirely new lens.”
Jenny Rice, University of Kentucky

"A significant contribution for rhetorical researchers."
Rhetoric Review

 

Planting the Anthropocene is a rhetorical look into the world of industrial tree planting in Canada that engages the themes of nature, culture, and environmental change. Bringing together the work of material ecocriticism and critical affect studies in service of a new materialist environmental rhetoric, Planting the Anthropocene forwards a frame that can be used to work through complex scenes of anthropogenic labor.
 
Using the results of interviews with seasonal Canadian tree planters, Jennifer Clary-Lemon interrogates the complex and messy imbrication of nature-culture through the inadequate terminology used to describe the actual circumstances of the planters’ work and lives—and offers alternative ways to conceptualize these circumstances. Although silvicultural workers do engage with the limiting rhetoric of efficiency and humanism, they also make rhetorical choices that break down the nature-culture divide and orient these concepts on a continuum that blurs the boundaries between the given and the constructed, the human and nonhuman. Tree-planting work is approached as a site of a deep-seated materiality—a continued re-creation of the land’s “disturbance”—rather than a simplistic form of doing good that further separates humans from landscapes.
 
Clary-Lemon’s view of nature and the Anthropocene through the lens of material rhetorical studies is thoroughly original and will be of great interest to students and scholars of rhetoric and composition, especially those focused on the environment.

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo and past editor of the journal Composition Studies. Her research interests include writing and location, disciplinarity, critical discourse studies, and research methodologies. Her work has been published in Rhetoric Review, Discourse and Society, The American Review of Canadian Studies, Composition Forum, Oral History Forum d'histoire orale, enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.

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Details

  • Paperback Price: $28.95
  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60732-854-4
  • Ebook Price: $23.95
  • 30-day ebook rental price: $11.50
  • EISBN: 978-1-60732-855-1
  • Publication Month: March
  • Publication Year: 2019
  • Pages: 219
  • Illustrations: 4
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: by Jennifer Clary-Lemon
  • ECommerce Code: 978-1-60732-854-4
  • Get Permissions: Get Permission

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