3,608 research outputs found
The Urgency of Ecocriticism and European Scholarship
Get PDFIn his article The Urgency of Ecocriticism and European Scholarship Simon C. Estok argues that there continues to be unduly disproportionate attention within ecocriticism on US-based scholarship and proportionally less on ecocriticism from other parts of the world. Estok focuses on European ecocritical work written in English and published by Rodopi in recent years and argues that this work attests both to the urgency and resolve of European ecocritics. Estok looks at some of the primary contributions of twelve books published within the past ten years by Rodopi in order to show the importance of bending our ecocritical ears, to stop fetishizing US-American scholarship, and to listen to what is coming out of Europe and other parts of the world
Suffering and climate change narratives
Get PDFIn his article Suffering and Climate Change Narratives Simon C. Estok begins with a brief survey of definitional issues involved with the term “suffering” and argues that there has been a relative lack of theoretical attention to suffering in climate change narratives, whether literary or within mainstream media. Estok shows that suffering, far from being singular, is a multivalent concept that is gendered, classed, raced, and, perhaps above all, pliable. It has social functions. One of the primary reasons for the failure of climate change narratives to effect real changes, Estok argues, is that they often carry the functions of suffering and act as a vehicle for the very social and psychological needs suffering fulfills
Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis
Get PDFIn his article Post 9/11 and Narratives of Life Writing, Conflict, and Environmental Crisis Simon C. Estok argues that there are four seemingly disparate and disconnected topics — war, migration, ecophobia, and life writing — which need to be discussed in tandem in order to produce deeper understandings of both the production and effects of post 9/11 narratives. Estok argues that narrative landscapes changed radically since the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this results in a combined effect both of terror reportage and of environmental crisis narratives. The pace and character of reportage blurred, erased, and expanded various boundaries and these changes will be increasingly central to discussions about life writing and its relation to environmental crisis writing
Re-defining South Korean Scholarship and Education within the Context of Globalization
Get PDFIn his article Re-defining South Korean Scholarship and Education within the Context of Globalization Simon C. Estok discusses effects of globalization on the educational and scholarly goals and realities of Korea. Estok argues that although the transformational impacts of globalization in terms of sports, entertainment, politics, and business in Korea are visible, efforts to produce more globally visible Korean scholarship have been ineffective and counter-productive. Estok shows that the imagined dangers to Korean nationhood are rooted in fears of invasion which have strong historical and contemporary justification. Colonized for a third of the twentieth century, Korea in the twenty-first century is a recipient, not a contributor, of global scholarly capital. True transformations of Korean education and scholarship, Estok argues, will only happen once Korea addresses the key issues: that solutions are often superficial, that there are fundamental differences between educational philosophies of Korea and the West, that policy makers are out-of-touch with the schools and universities, and that racism and xenophobia within Korea are hindrances
Book Review: Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene
Get PDFDr. Simon C. Estok is a full professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University
(South Korea’s first and oldest university). He is editor of the A&HCI journal Neohelicon and is an
elected member of The European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Estok teaches literary theory,
ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare:
Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and his much anticipated The Ecophobia
Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018; reprinted with errata as paperback in 2020) has been translated into
Turkish (tr. M. Sibel Dinçel) and is currently being translated into Chinese and Korean. He is coeditor
of five books: Anthropocene Ecologies of Food (Routledge, April 2022), Mushroom Clouds:
Ecological Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia (Routledge, March 2021),
Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International Perspectives in Feminist
Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). Estok has published
extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English
Studies in Canada, English Language Notes, and others. He is currently working on a book about slime
in the Western cultural and literary imagination
Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, and Portraying the Journey
Get PDFIn his article Cannibalism, Ecocriticism, and Portraying the Journey Simon C. Estok discusses the ways early modern preoccupation with cannibalism is at once rooted in and reflective of an ecophobic environmental ethics. Looking both at descriptions of metaphoric and literal cannibalism, Estok shows that imagining cannibalism was central to the travel narrative and to its investments in writing the center and the periphery, the human and the nonhuman, the acceptable and the repugnant — binaries which reveal ethical positions, not only toward people, but, more broadly, toward the natural environment. Estok argues that it is relevant to discuss the discourse of cannibalism through an ecocritical perspective because it allows for the analysis of important interconnections of the writing of cannibalism with discourses of race, sexuality, and class. In many ways central to the imagining of newly discovered lands, the discourse of cannibalism is thoroughly soaked into the literature of the early modern period, and though cannibalism has long been a topic of literary scholars, little work has yet been done looking at cannibalism from an ecocritical perspective
Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror
Get PDFIn his article Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror Simon C. Estok argues that we cannot ignore the context of terror in and through which ecocriticism works and that the relationships between the imagining of terror on the one hand and the conceptualizing of hostile environments on the other is in very serious need of critical analysis. Changes in how we think about nature are also long overdue, as are changes in how we think about doing ecocriticism. Working toward these changes now in our scholarship will take us leaps and bounds closer to the activist intervention about which ecocriticism has always fantasized. The contexts through which ecocriticism work today are much different than they were twenty years ago when ecocriticism made its entrance with such anticipation, hope, naïveté, and optimism. To mainstream ecocritics, theory was out, mimetic realism was in, and the future looked bright and restorable. The anti-climax with which the twentieth century rolled into the twenty-first was only outdone by the terror that blindsided the world and has grown like a cancer to involve many an unwitting accomplice. The theory that exploded onto the ecocritical scene in 2009 and brought us the term ecophobia has also radically altered things
International perspectives in feminist ecocriticism [Reseña de Libro]
No full textReseña de libro: Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok and Serpil Oppermann (eds.), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2013), xvii + 290 pp
Yeast metabolism in fresh and frozen dough : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Food Technology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Get PDFAuthor also known as SM LovedayFresh bakery products have a very short shelf life, which limits the extent to which manufacturing can be centralised. Frozen doughs are relatively stable and can be manufactured in large volumes, distributed and baked on-demand at the point of sale or consumption. With appropriate formulation and processing a shelf life of several months can be achieved.Shelf life is limited by a decline in proofing rate after thawing, which is attributed to a) the dough losing its ability to retain gas and b) insufficient gas production, i.e. yeast activity. The loss of shelf life is accelerated by delays between mixing and freezing, which allow yeast cells the chance to ferment carbohydrates.This work examined the reasons for insufficient gas production after thawing frozen dough and the effect of pre-freezing fermentation on shelf life. Literature data on yeast metabolite dynamics in fermenting dough were incomplete. In particular there were few data on the accumulation of ethanol, a major fermentation end product which can be injurious to yeast.Doughs were prepared in a domestic breadmaker using compressed yeast from a local manufacturer and analysed for glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose and ethanol. Gas production after thawing declined within 48 hours of frozen storage. This was accelerated by 30 or 90 minutes of fermentation at 30;C prior to freezing.Sucrose was rapidly hydrolysed and yeast consumed glucose in preference to fructose. Maltose was not consumed while other sugars remained. Ethanol, accumulated from consumption of glucose and fructose, was produced in approximately equal amounts to CO2, indicating that yeast cells metabolised reductively.Glucose uptake in fermenting dough followed simple hyperbolic kinetics and fructose uptake was competitively inhibited by glucose. Mathematical modelling indicated that diffusion of sugars and ethanol in dough occurred quickly enough to eliminate solute gradients brought about by yeast metabolism
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