Ecologies of the Senses in Contemporary Literature

Foregrounding the role of the senses in human experience and imagination, this book expands our understanding of the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds. It argues for an examination of regions considered animal, even vegetal, that hide within the human as a powerful means to think of the human as an extension of natural ecology. In light of an increasing awareness of nonhuman intelligences, this book explores new imaginaries by reconfiguring the human sensorium as a site of ecological entanglements. It draws on ecocritical, indigenous, and new materialist philosophies and turns to a diverse range of literary works by writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, and Michael Ondaatje in ways that reveal embodied sensory knowledge as a form of attunement to a dynamic environment that includes organisms and patterns of energy flow within a biospherical web of relations. Conceiving of perception as an ecological, embodied phenomenon, it proposes an approach that radically rethinks dualisms between nature and culture, matter and mind, and the human and nonhuman.