Jessica Landau & Maria Lux - "Unserious Ecocriticism" - Darya Tsymbalyuk, Patrick Gonder, Kimiko Matsumura, and Deke Weaver

Co-editors, Jessica Landau and Maria Lux, will discuss their book Unserious Ecocriticism: Humor, Play, and Environmental Destruction in Art & Visual Culture. They will be joined in conversation by interlocutor Darya Tsymbalyuk and contributors Patrick Gonder, Kimiko Matsumura, and Deke Weaver. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

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About the Book

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, the essays, artworks, and other contributions in 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.

About the Editors

Jessica Landau is an Assistant Instructional Professor in CEGU at the University of Chicago. Trained as an art historian, Landau's research looks at images of North American megafauna from the 19th and 20th centuries in order to understand the ways in which problematic settler colonial and masculinist tropes from these periods are still present in contemporary conservation discourse.

Maria Lux, Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College, is a research-driven artist who makes installation-based works centering on the way animals are used to generate human knowledge and understanding.

Patrick Gonder is Professor of English and Humanities at College of Lake County.

Kimiko Matsumura is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lake Forest College.

Deke Weaver is Professor of New Media at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

About the Interlocutor

Darya Tsymbalyuk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Chicago. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, and her practice includes writing and image-making.