Ecologies of the Senses in Contemporary Literature : Navigating Animate Worlds

Foregrounding the role of the senses in human experience and imagination, Ecologies of the Senses expands our understanding of the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds.

The book argues for an examination of regions considered animal, even vegetal, that hide within the human as a powerful means to think of the human as an extension of natural ecology. In light of an increasing awareness of nonhuman intelligences, it explores new imaginaries by reconfiguring the human sensorium as a site of ecological entanglements. Drawing on ecocritical, Indigenous, and new materialist philosophies, it analyzes a diverse range of literary works by writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Michael Ondaatje to reveal embodied sensory knowledge as a form of attunement to a living, breathing biosphere. It posits perception as an ecological, embodied phenomenon and radically rethinks dominant dualisms between nature and culture, matter and mind, and the human and the nonhuman.