Reading for Wonder: Ecology; Ethics; Enchantment

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Book Description

This PDF ebook, titled “Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, and Enchantment,” begins by elucidating the nature and artifice of wonder as both a human potential and as an experience that is produced. Wonder is viewed both as a human capacity and as an experience that is fabricated. In a society that is saturated with amazing and sensual technology encounters, wonder possesses many different capacities, one of which is the ability to alert us to unforeseen ecological entanglements and intimacies. However, this profoundly felt experience, which is simultaneously aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical, has been fatally disregarded in the instruction we receive regarding our culture. It is necessary for us to teach others and ourselves how to read with a sense of wonder in order to build the imaginative empathy and caution that this sensation produces.

Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, delving into topics such as foodstuffs, wonder cabinets, movies, poetry, tropical islands, apes, abstract painting, penguins, and more. The book also investigates the ethical power and political risks associated with wonder, beginning in early modern times and continuing up to the present day. In order to save ourselves and the abundant life on our planet, as well as to thrive, we need to free wonder from the ideologies of enchantment and disenchantment; grasp its workings and their ethical ambiguities; and give it a clear vocabulary and voice.