Description: Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean eschews the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism and lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across periods and languages. congratulatory claims of posthumanism and lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across periods and languages.
Brief description: Phillip John Usher is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Review Quotes: In each of his chapters, Usher presents careful readings and explications of poems and texts--some forgotten, some famous but now read in another vein--gradually building up a tissue of connections across a veritable culture of extraction, yes, but more, a material culture that stands at the beginning of a teasing out of the values, difficulties, and ecological consequences of the processes that in turn came to form our own Anthropocene. In doing so, he also charges us to return to those texts of the well-worn Renaissance, to the quarrying and mining of that era's building materials, to the labors and desolation incurred, and to the mythical and real powers that extraction invoked.---Anthony Vidler, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians