Chapter 18 - Affect and Environment in Contemporary Ecopoetics

Summary

This chapter explores expanded forms of psychoanalytic methods that produce developmental accounts of perception and affect in relation to the external world. It turns to Melanie Klein’s ideas of object relations and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s redirection of Klein’s work through affect theory as particularly fruitful sites for ecocritical theorizations of affect in an era of generalized biospheric crisis. These theories and the associated affects they consider—particularly depression and dread—offer powerful conceptual tools for reading recent poetic representations of the disturbing affects associated with ecological relationality under crisis conditions. The chapter offers extended readings of the poetry of Inger Christensen, Jorie Graham, and Craig Santos Perez as examples of ecopoetics texts that portray the complex ways environmental relations shape subject formation and affective experience in a time of pervasive biospheric transformations.