INFOWHELM
Columbia University Press, 2020
Finalist, 2022 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Book Award
Finalist, 2021 ASLE-UK Ireland Book Prize
How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm I explore the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload.
Praise for Infowhelm
ambitious and dazzling . . . witty and unexpected . . . Infowhelm pushes environmental humanities scholarship forward by leaps and bounds by identifying and ameliorating major oversights.
—Nicole Seymour, ISLE
Houser uncovers how artists alchemize scientific information into aesthetic material in contemporary environmental art. Her writing method reveals that wonder is the essence of inquiry. As a result, a deluge of contested data on crises provokes artists to ruminate on the limits of knowledge and of all that the data cannot communicate. —Orion
…a terrific and timely interdisciplinary method, bridging environmental and digital humanities. Houser asks deep, consequential questions about how data comes to matter, and more specifically how the arts (across media) can bring the data of climate change into affective presence, individual action, and community conversation. —Stephanie LeMenager
Houser calls for a détente between science/technology and humanistic and narrative ways of understanding the world….This book is a polished and mature work of scholarship that adds wonderful new ideas to the discussion of how science and the arts mutually influence one another. —Amy Elias
Assembling a fascinating constellation of artworks that conjure the perplexities of the contemporary informational condition in exciting new ways, she makes a strong case for rethinking the relation between aesthetic experience and epistemology from the ground up. —Mark McGurl
Available at Columbia UP, Bookshop, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble
ECOSICKNESS
Columbia University Press, 2014
Winner, 2015 Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize
Finalist, 2014 British Society of Literature & Science Book Prize
The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between these forms of threat and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness.
Praise for Ecosickness
…a quartet of carefully argued chapters, in which a handful of "ecosickness fiction "are closely read through the lenses of their particular narrative affects: discord, wonder, disgust and anxiety….These readings are richly rewarding…Houser's formulation that "fiction extends an invitation to read its stories out into the world" is unusually suggestive. —Times Literary Supplement
…what genuinely distinguishes Houser’s endeavor is its rigorous taxonomy of the various—and sometimes paradoxical—emotional patterns that govern the generic rubric of bodily and planetary awareness. —Public Books
Houser positions the affects stimulated by literature as key to producing political adjustments. —American Literature
ultimately presents sickness as a constructive power, a condition able to stimulate social reorganization, create new identity formations, and inspire ethical environmental thought and action. —Modern Fiction Studies
Houser engages with affect theory to push the boundaries of material ecocriticism in an innovative and necessary direction…She insightfully complicates the role of "writer-activist" and asks her audience to consider critically what shape this activism might take and what its future might entail. —ISLE
Available at Columbia UP, Bookshop, Indiebound, Barnes & Noble