Unserious Ecocriticism

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice are complex, messy, and gravely important issues. In addressing these concerns, traditional ecocriticism understandably has taken itself very seriously. Unserious Ecocriticism, by contrast, highlights alternative responses to the challenges of environmental collapse and catastrophe. By theorizing an unserious ecocriticism, contributors to this volume validate and empower alternatives to mainstream environmentalism, scholarship, and artmaking. The essays, artworks, and non-traditional scholarly formats of this edited collection demonstrate that the creative tools available to artists and those who study them are particularly well positioned to inventively disrupt normative modes of ecocritical presentation and environmentalist thought.

Rather than approach environmental crises through tragic and dire warnings, contributors take seriously the unexpected or easily dismissed, play with format and form, embrace the bodily and abject, take pleasure in their subjects of study, have fun, and crack jokes. In Unserious Ecocriticism, humor, playfulness, parody, and irreverence become tools to challenge expectations, cope with complicated problems, and imagine new futures.

Edited by Jessica Landau and Maria Lux, with a foreword by Aaron Sachs and contributions from Allie ES Wist, Deke Weaver, Kathleen McDermott, Annie Ronan, Kimiko Matsumura, Ina Linge, Paula Kupfer, Craig Carey, Anna Ialeggio, Topher Lineberry, Stentor Danielson, Patrick Gonder, Matthew Teti, Nicole Seymour, with Emily Eliza Scott, Rob Gioielli, and Jenny Price, Phaan Howng, and Jennifer Schell.

Jessica Landau is an assistant instructional professor in the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. Her work, typically about the representation of large North American mammals, cryptozoological and otherwise, has been published in American Art, Curator: the Museum Journal, as well as other journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogs.

Maria Lux is an artist and associate professor of art at Whitman College whose research-based practice is centered on animals and their relationship to human knowledge. Her multi-disciplinary installations have included objects ranging from a life-sized parade float of a sheep wearing a life vest, to fake raccoons attached to Roombas. Her artwork has been exhibited in gallery spaces as well as storefront windows and abandoned malls.