This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natur... more This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natural philosophy, particularly concerning ether, Queen Mab develops an ethereal poetics that suspends the division of spirit from matter. I trace, throughout Shelley's poetry, complex metaphors that draw spirit towards matter, and vice versa. This upending of metaphorical and metaphysical hierarchies has political consequences. Shelley's poem seeks to subvert all forms of anthropocentric sovereign power. Projecting a utopian future, in which humans reconcile themselves to nature, Shelley identifies an obstacle to its realization: "commerce," and the world-destroying labor that makes it possible. To be freed from the laws of commerce is to inhabit a new relation to need and to activity altogether. For Shelley, utopia realized must be "a paradise of peace," achievable only by relinquishing the desire to remake the world. Shelley again invokes ether as the spirit of nature and the sign of paradise's imminent arrival. The vehicle of a utopian natural history, ether reconciles passivity and liberation, nature and humanity, as much as matter and spirit.
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilde... more While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilderness>> insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natur... more This essay is about atmosphere in Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (1813). Engaged with debates in natural philosophy, particularly concerning ether, Queen Mab develops an ethereal poetics that suspends the division of spirit from matter. I trace, throughout Shelley's poetry, complex metaphors that draw spirit towards matter, and vice versa. This upending of metaphorical and metaphysical hierarchies has political consequences. Shelley's poem seeks to subvert all forms of anthropocentric sovereign power. Projecting a utopian future, in which humans reconcile themselves to nature, Shelley identifies an obstacle to its realization: "commerce," and the world-destroying labor that makes it possible. To be freed from the laws of commerce is to inhabit a new relation to need and to activity altogether. For Shelley, utopia realized must be "a paradise of peace," achievable only by relinquishing the desire to remake the world. Shelley again invokes ether as the spirit of nature and the sign of paradise's imminent arrival. The vehicle of a utopian natural history, ether reconciles passivity and liberation, nature and humanity, as much as matter and spirit.
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilde... more While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilderness>> insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
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Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.