TY - JOUR AU1 - Clark, Timothy AB - A "deconstructive turn" characterizes recent criticism on the environmental crisis. Within the past few years, there has been a spate of texts that address environmental issues with recognizably "deconstructive" arguments, or with frequent, though sometimes critical, references to the thinking of Derrida, and, in one striking recent study, to Paul de Man.1 This paper sums up the salient force of this new work, justifying the term "deconstructive turn" and highlighting the intellectual break being made from most given critical work on environmental issues. The thinkers at issue here, from various disciplines, are Nigel Clark, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, Timothy Morton, and Bronislaw Szerszynski, along with some of my own work in ecocriticism. If any one thing gives impetus to this rush of texts, it is an engagement with the intellectual challenge of climate change, something still often absent from mainstream ecocriticism. It is as if this topic were inherently deconstructive of many previously reliable assumptions in the humanities. Ironically, some of the features that earlier ecocritics associated loosely with "deconstructionism," "post-modernism," or "post-structuralism," etc. (usually not bothering to discriminate between them) sound like several now associated with climate change--lack of fully determinable reference; uncertainty as TI - The Deconstructive Turn in Environmental Criticism JF - symploke DA - 2013-12-22 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-nebraska-press/the-deconstructive-turn-in-environmental-criticism-yO9VNHN2BA SP - 11 EP - 26 VL - 21 IS - 1 DP - DeepDyve ER -