An engrossing book," recommended by Kirkus Reviews A Homeland Security agent tasked with keeping New York City alive falls for a woman determined to protect its most vulnerable creatures in this striking fiction debut. New York in 2057—a metropolis divided. Sheltered by seawalls, privileged Manhattan is green, clean, and thriving while Brooklyn and Queens have been given up to the rising Atlantic. Shavir knows she will be charged as a terrorist should she ever get caught, but she thinks of herself as a barista, a community farmer, and an underground activist fighting for the forgotten and the discarded. Her heart beats for the people on the sprawling rooftop farm she has helped build in broken Brooklyn, a big bubbly dog called Sam, and all the other animals she pulls out of cages at night. The last thing she needs is to fall for a Homeland Security guy. Jake works for Homeland because he’s brilliant at securing critical medical drugs for New York in a world running out of everything. Haunted by the loss of his family at the age of 12, he is a sensitive man with too much amphetamine in his blood who can't afford to care for anyone, least of all a woman who is keeping secrets from him. His view of whose lives must be saved and who can be sacrificed is challenged when Shavir takes him across the East River to the people he was ordered to ignore. Soon, they both start to question the fragile truths they built their lives upon. FRAGILE is a gripping thriller, an intricate look into our future, and a moving story of hope and commitment against all odds. Marvelously immersive and eerily realistic, it is an unflinching examination of our need for love and connection in times of social and environmental crisis.
How do we experience the virtual environments in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others at risk? Weik von Mossner explores these questions that are important to anyone interested in the emotional, persuasive power of environmental narratives.
In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man. The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.
The book explores the role of empathy and emotion in the emergence of cosmopolitan imaginations through the works of a diverse set of American writers who during World War II and the early Cold War period lived in Europe, Asia, and Africa. It draws on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies to offer a new perspective on the affective and imaginative underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism. It argues that our emotional engagements with others -- real and imagined -- are crucially important for the development of cosmopolitan imaginations. The book concentrates on specifically American cosmopolitan imaginations in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on a core of transnational writers who, for various reasons, had highly conflicted relationships with the American nation: Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Paul Bowles. Their literary works are emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States; at the same time, they testify to the complex cosmopolitan identities of their authors. Reading these texts as affective cosmopolitan critiques, the book works out important and complex role played by imaginative and emotional engagements in the development of solidarities that go beyond self, family, community, and nation. Reading transnational American literature from a cognitive perspective, the book adds a new dimension to recent work in American literary history that seeks to reconceptualize U.S. literary and cultural production in its global context. At the same time, it also widens and deepens the array of literature available to researchers in cognitive literary studies" --
An engrossing book," recommended by Kirkus Reviews A Homeland Security agent tasked with keeping New York City alive falls for a woman determined to protect its most vulnerable creatures in this striking fiction debut. New York in 2057—a metropolis divided. Sheltered by seawalls, privileged Manhattan is green, clean, and thriving while Brooklyn and Queens have been given up to the rising Atlantic. Shavir knows she will be charged as a terrorist should she ever get caught, but she thinks of herself as a barista, a community farmer, and an underground activist fighting for the forgotten and the discarded. Her heart beats for the people on the sprawling rooftop farm she has helped build in broken Brooklyn, a big bubbly dog called Sam, and all the other animals she pulls out of cages at night. The last thing she needs is to fall for a Homeland Security guy. Jake works for Homeland because he’s brilliant at securing critical medical drugs for New York in a world running out of everything. Haunted by the loss of his family at the age of 12, he is a sensitive man with too much amphetamine in his blood who can't afford to care for anyone, least of all a woman who is keeping secrets from him. His view of whose lives must be saved and who can be sacrificed is challenged when Shavir takes him across the East River to the people he was ordered to ignore. Soon, they both start to question the fragile truths they built their lives upon. FRAGILE is a gripping thriller, an intricate look into our future, and a moving story of hope and commitment against all odds. Marvelously immersive and eerily realistic, it is an unflinching examination of our need for love and connection in times of social and environmental crisis.
During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.
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