Description: Aidan Tynan provocatively rethinks some of the core assumptions of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Showing the significance of deserts and wastelands in literature since the Romantics, he argues that the desert has served to articulate anxieties over the cultural significance of space in the Anthropocene. He explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity. And he looks at how the desert has been a terrain of desire over which the Western imagination of space and place has range, in writings from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo, from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.
Brief description: Aidan Tynan Senior Lecturer in English literature at Cardiff University. He is the author of Deleuze's Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (Edinburgh, 2012). He had co-edited two volumes: Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Review Quotes: This is a fantastic book, one that challenges and indeed moves the reader on virtually every page. It is worth reading for this alone--the sense one has, while reading it, of being in the presence of a brilliant mind moving from one original, well-crafted idea to the next. [...] Tynan's achievement is nonetheless considerable: the book is an important contribution not only to the humanities but also to broader debates around how we might avoid the worst of the catastrophic ecological scenarios that are already at play.--Cory Stockwell "symplokē"