The Environmental Sublime and Ecological Melancholy
Economides, Louise (2016) ‘The Environmental Sublime and Ecological Melancholy’, in The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 109–152. doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-47750-7_4
Abstract:
Economides examines the technological sublime’s environmental legacy in this chapter, asserting that high-tech global capitalism’s unintended by-products (including large-scale pollution) have inspired a new and terrifying locus of properly environmental sublimity in contemporary art. Contrary to previous modes of sublimity, the environmental sublime does not valorize human reason, but instead traces a profound irrationality underpinning consumer society. However, rather than mobilizing reform, the environmental sublime reflects an ambivalent politics whose most distinguishing feature is melancholy. Economides illustrates ways the environmental sublime is evoked in postmodern art such as DeLillo’s White Noise and Hayes’s The Rime of the Modern Mariner, and contrasts the loss elegized in such texts with that registered in romantic works such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.