Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Humanising the Nonhuman: An Ecocritical Toolbox for Anthropomorphic Agency

2023-06-19T20:28:23+02:00

Ecocriticism tends to acknowledge anthropomorphisms as a possible tool to create empathy for nonhumans, but in doing so mostly labels said tool as too sentimental for serious environmental literature. This paper aims to establish a categorisation of anthropomorphisms in media that allows a more diverse and detailed analysis of humanised nonhumans. It seeks to overcome the prevailing idea that anthropomorphic descriptions are limited to nonhuman animals and therefore extends the term to the humanisation of anything that is not human. Following the school of thought suggested by new materialism and material ecocriticism, nonhumans are regarded as having agency and anthropomorphising them allows humans to empathise with nonhumans. The categorisation of anthropomorphism proposed here is divided into each three markers and modes. The markers signify which part of the human can be observed in the anthropomorphised subject, while the modes define how this is realised. This article exemplifies the concept of markers and modes through anthropomorphic trees in literature, but as it is not a static concept, it allows for overlaps between categories and dynamic adaptations for other cases of anthropomorphised subjects. The three markers are Physicality, Sentience, and Language and may appear also in combinations. The modes are Projection, Manifestation, and Hybridity. As anthropomorphisms strongly intersect with theories of nonhuman agency, this, too, will be discussed in the final section of this article.

The Ecological Derivation of the Myth of Orpheus in Irene Solà's "Canto yo y la montaña baila"

2023-08-11T17:38:55+02:00

This article proposes an interpretation of Irene Solà’s Canto yo y la montaña baila based on the myth of Orpheus. The text defends that instead of updating the myth's plot to the present context, the novel constructs its multiple narrative voices by using the figure of Orpheus as the model author. The chant as Orphic incantamentum is assimilated as an element of the fictional pact of the work to make credible and acceptable the multiple non-human narrators that compose the novel's diegetic universe. However, unlike the classical myth, the Orphic song does not subjugate the will and agency of the animals, placing them at the service of the poet, but allows them to assume a voice of their own and give an account of their experience of the world. It is in this sense that we argue that it is an ecological derivation of the myth of Orpheus, since the enchantment that the Orphic song brings about reveals the uniqueness of each of the beings that make up the earth, as well as the interdependencies that exist between them and that make up the higher organism called Gaia.

Queer Ecology and the Ecology of Queerness in the Work of Jean Giono

2023-08-28T16:20:11+02:00

The importance of the natural world for Jean Giono is well known and commented upon in the critical literature. Sadly, the novelist’s ecological consciousness seems to be too often yet one more reason to call him conservative, pastoralist, or backward-looking. This interpretation, however, can only be made by ignoring the eroticism that infuses the images of the nonhuman world. This essay shows how Giono depicts a proliferation of sexual and affective possibilities with and within the natural environment, resisting all norms and prescriptions. His writing thus falls into the purview of what is now called “Queer ecology,” a term that indicates “interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature” (Sandilands). Giono refuses to confine his characters to traditional gender roles and shows the affective and sexual lives of bodies whose sexuality is traditionally repressed or denied by society (fat, handicapped, or old bodies). He writes of mutual and reciprocal relationships between human beings and other living or non-living things, and even shows bestiality, not as a perverse practice, but as the revenge of nature on the men who exploit it. Finally, he separates eroticism in general from the sexual act, liberating pleasure in contact with the environment and allowing for the full range of meaning of the word “biophilia.”

Anti-Pastoral and the Prophetic Mode in Moddi’s Climate Songs

2023-09-14T15:39:42+02:00

This article explores aspects of apocalypse and pastoral in the climate themed song lyrics of Norwegian indie folk artist Moddi. Through close listening and contextualizing of the songs “Noens ark” (“Someone’s ark”, 2013) and “En sang om fly” (“A song about planes”, 2013), apocalypse and pastoral emerge as key motifs. These are navigated in an exploration of a conflicted Norwegian response to global warming. The songs express critique of unrelenting pursuits of economic growth and personal consumption even as the future imposes itself on the present. In two different ways, elements of indie folk music are tailored to express an ontologically unsettling encounter with a global environmental risk scenario. “Noens ark” employs forceful instrumentation and polyrhythms to evoke a sense of alarm and urgency called for by the projection of future disaster. “En sang om fly” is a soft composition projecting nostalgia for the material conditions of the present. The desire for these conditions ultimately locks the singer in a cycle of repetition that destabilizes the very conditions he desires. The nuances afforded by this expression in musical performance allows song lyrics to sustain contradictory attitudes towards globalization. In their pursuit of these contradictions, Moddi’s climate songs can be seen as part of an anti-pastoral tradition. Features of musical genre and a prophetic lyric mode are employed to evoke and subvert a pastoral response to apocalypticism. By musically sustaining contradictions between pastoral and apocalypse, Moddi’s songs reflect a conflict between Norwegian identity and a global cultural imaginary in the face of global warming.

"Life is but a detail here": The rural world, nature and peasantry in Miguel Hernández's poetry

2023-09-15T21:18:15+02:00

The rural, the peasantry, the agricultural work in constant proximity to a nature that is loved, feared and respected are key in Miguel Hernández’s poetry. His work has been widely studied, from a biographical perspective, regarding his rural and humble origins; however, it has not been approached from a proper consideration of the historical and material reality of the rural world. From the approaches of rural sociology, agroecology and the radical historicity of literature, this article attempts to shed light on some unsolved aspects of the poetic work of Hernández, considering that his conception of nature, work, desire and revolution are imbricated in the conceptions of a peasantry inscribed in the longue durée, the Romantic split of the subject with nature and the need to overcome the contradictions of modern society. On this basis, we see the importance of the peasantry in Hernández's ideological configuration and in his poetological and political approaches. Hernández can be considered as a genuine peasant voice as well as a modern one. This is not only a matter of thematic importance but also of the productive logic of his poetry. The writer approaches the poetic task as the peasant: making an effort of production which is not the abstract labour of capital but the constant productive and reproductive task of the human body in symbiotic relationship with the natural and social world. From this perspective, this paper aims to show the potential interest of an ecocritical approach to his poetry.

Anthropocenic Futures and Precarious Bodies. A Reading of "Mugre rosa" (2020) by Fernanda Trías

2023-12-13T20:47:28+01:00

Mugre rosa (2020), by Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías, depicts a near-future Montevideo, where the population is confronted with climatic disaster and the propagation of a devastating disease. In this article, I explore the representation of bodily precarity in the context of environmental catastrophe, arguing that this vulnerability constitutes a point of resistance from which to rethink human identity. On the one hand, exposure to an anthropogenic environment is interpreted as instrumental to late capitalist biopolitics. This is revealed through the cartographies of precarity emerging from the novel, which reflect not only the chasm between Global North and Global South but also local inequalities. On the other hand, this corporeal exposure constitutes a challenge to traditional representations of the human. Through the analysis of the depiction of the illness, I discuss how this deconstruction of the body favours the emergence of a new, interconnected identity. Ultimately, I suggest that a destabilising age such as the Anthropocene constitutes not only a profound moment of crisis but also a privileged space to rethink human subjectivity and its modes of representation.

Credits 15.2

2024-10-23T00:05:55+02:00

Credits 15.2

Editorial

2024-09-13T15:03:29+02:00

Editorial.

Illustrations of the Meta Landscape

2024-05-24T16:13:38+02:00

Illustrations.

Forcing the Bond

2023-09-19T13:49:20+02:00

Poem.

Other Horses

2024-05-16T04:13:27+02:00

Creative writing.

Poems

2023-08-19T19:03:33+02:00

Poems.

The Weight of the Air

2024-03-02T06:21:51+01:00

Poems.

Between Land and Sea: The Aesthetics of Diasporic Ecologies. An Interview with Paolo Shuai Peng

2024-07-16T16:21:45+02:00

Qian Liu interviews Paolo Peng Shuai, a multidisciplinary artist based in Milan, Italy.

An Ash Tree in Os

2023-02-03T11:50:21+01:00

Creative writing.

Editorial 15.2

2024-10-07T15:20:05+02:00

Editorial 15.2

Disruptive Encounters. Concepts of Care and Contamination out of Control. An Introduction

2024-09-05T19:28:06+02:00

Introduction to the guest edited section.

Disruptive Knowledge Structures between Ecology and Economy: The Arctic as Contact Scene and Global Common in Wolf Harlander's Ecothriller "Schmelzpunkt" (2022)

2024-03-15T10:21:34+01:00

This article analyses the recently published eco-thriller Schmelzpunkt (2022) by Wolf Harlander with regard to the fictional depiction of disturbing encounters in the Arctic region. Schmelzpunkt focuses on environmental disasters, species extinction, glacier melt, economic and political struggles between major global powers such as China, Russia and the USA, but also Germany, calling into question the image of the Arctic as a place of refuge far removed from civilisation. The trigger is an unusual fish kill, the causes of which can only be uncovered through the interaction between indigenous knowledge and modern biology and the collaboration of socially heterogeneous groups after numerous mysterious attempts to cover it up. An ecological catastrophe occurs and an even greater one is only just prevented.

On the one hand, the study focuses on situations of (scientific) communication within the framework of so-called “Contact Scenes” (Koch/Nitzke 2022), in which different social power systems meet and which at the same time create a framework in which the exchange and production of knowledge, as well as disruptive disturbances of social systems of order, can be analysed. On the other hand, the conditions of the contact scenes are linked to the question of the commons, i.e. the distribution of resources and their rights of use, which overlays the conflict of the power systems depicted in the eco-thriller. Based on Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (1968) and more recent positions of Elinor Ostrom ([2009] 2022) and Silke Helfrich (2012, 2021 with Johannes Euler), which emphasise the binding nature of resource use in the form of social practices (commoning), the literary function of these approaches in the eco-thriller will be examined. Overall, it will be shown that literature can make current complex crisis situations accessible and in what way it can contribute to overcoming them.

Coastal World Literature: Encounters at the Shores of Europe

2024-04-12T11:20:43+02:00

Shorelines are at the forefront when it comes to the effects of climate change. They are equally a preferred leisure destination for global northerners to seek respite and some sort of ecological reconnection. This article argue that the coast offers valuable insight as a literary site of disruptive encounters. At the coast, economic, ecological, and cultural disparity interweave, and can therefore carry manifold connotations, emotions, and prospects dependent of your vantage point. As such, I argue, the coastal site offers fundamentally different temporalities and experiences depending on the vantage point. To exemplify this point, the article examines contemporary registrations of the southernmost European shore in the wake of the so-called migrant crisis that occurred as the Arab Spring revolutions was met by autocratic pushbacks. Furthermore, the article presents the term ‘coastal world literature’ as a methodology of interpreting literature at the dynamic littoral zone between land and sea. Readings of the novel What Strange Paradise (2021) by Egyptian-Canadian author Omar El Akkad, the collection of poems Mare Nostrum (2019) by Libyan-American author Khaled Mattawa , the novel Til stranden (2017; To the Beach) by Danish author Peter Højrup, and the collection of poems titled Bag bakkerne, kysten (2017; Behind the Dunes, the Coast) by Danish author Peter Clement-Woetmann support the assertion that coastal texts are informed by their position within the world-system. In effect, coastal world literature reveals valuable first encounters of disparity, unevenness, and the range of accompanied affective responses. Consequently, what happens at the shore and how we tell it matters immensely.

Ambivalent Entanglements: Horse-human encounters in Benedikt Erlingsson's film "Hross í oss" (2013)

2024-03-15T10:00:30+01:00

For over a millennium, Icelandic horses have occupied a position between (semi-)wild animal, livestock and companion species. The film Hross í oss (2013) by director Benedikt Erlingsson explores these ambivalent entanglements. In my contribution, I show that Erlingsson's forms of visualisation correspond to the way horses communicate. He succeeds not only in assigning horses an active role within the diegetic world, but also in aligning the narrative structures of the film with them.

Horses often function as a metaphor for human conflicts simply through the practice of riding. There is a danger of reducing the existence of horses to externally determined practices of domination. Inspired by Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Ann-Sofie Lönngren's work on animals in literature, I address this problem by reading with care. My analysis of interspecies communication, taking into account film narratological elements, shows horse-human encounters in a different light.

The Sounds of Cetacean Revolution Through History

2024-03-15T11:29:57+01:00

This article examines rogue whale encounters in seventeenth-century English poet Edmund Waller’s “The Battle of the Summer Isles” (1645), a poem that seeks to establish human dominion through an epic struggle between settlers attempting landfall on the Bermudian shore and a pod of sperm whales who prevent such actions. Through the poem’s use of sound, in particular the whales’ cries for justice, I find resonance with the concept of nonhuman revolutions we see actualized through the whales and orcas of today. This article traces a cultural history of whale resistance by and through sound. Part 1 recalls historical whale resistance narratives to establish prevalence for what we now term “orcanization.” I briefly show how three particular whales have disrupted narratives of cetacean kindness or friendship, choosing anti-human violence despite their capacity for kindness: White Gladis of yacht-sinking fame, the notorious Tilikum of Blackfish (2013), and Mocha Dick, the sperm whale that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Part 2 explores how Waller’s whales represent a narrative of roguish animal revolution: of whales that, in their courage, disruption, and refusal to die, muddle the Empire’s myth of New World domination. In conclusion, I assert that in the sound of orcas breaking rudders today we can hear a history of whale narratives: examples of resistance, calls for reparation, and a reminder that this world is a shared one

Between Colonial History and Genocide: On Continuity Lines of the Representation of Animal-Human Relationships in German Publications and Photographs on Rwanda

2024-03-15T11:26:41+01:00

Using texts and photographs from different eras, the article attempts to draw lines of continuity between the colonisation of Rwanda by the German Empire and the present day. The aim is to show that the Hamitic theories, which from the mid-1890s led to the gradual ethnification of the country and the essentialisation of three supposedly separate “ethnic groups,” produced a policy based on discrimination, expulsions, massacres and looting, particularly from 1959 onwards. These acts of violence against the Tutsi minority gradually prepared the ground for the genocide of 1994. The previous animalisation of the victims corresponded to a problematic humanisation of their cows. The goal was the same both times: the herds, like their owners, were subjected to violence that aimed for long, cruel agonies. In this way, the perpetrators attempted to realise the racist concept of a “body standard” from which both the Tutsi and their animals had “deviated.” Furthermore, the Tutsi, as supposedly “foreign,” were to be sent “back to their Egyptian homeland.” Although the Hamitic theories must be regarded as an integral part of the genocidal ideology, the old stereotypes have become a dominant theme in German development policy writings, novels, newspaper articles and reports on Rwanda. This goes so far that a decidedly negationist “expert” could still be found in the advisory staff of German President Köhler. In 2017, a museum was opened in Kigali, financed by Germany, which is named after a German colonialist whose role in the spread of “Hamitism” is beyond doubt. This raises the question of the suppression of a catastrophe that should have affected the Germans' identity with their call of “Never again!”

Narrating Disruptive Encounters in the Forest: Hunting, Animal Lives, and Ecology

2024-03-15T09:07:53+01:00

Over the last century, three popular writers and media personalities have written bestsellers and created TV programs in order to alert the general public to the suffering of wild animals as well as the deleterious effects on young trees caused directly or indirectly by hunting and forestry practices. Austrian journalist and writer Felix Salten published Bambi: A Story of Life in the Woods (1923), using a baby deer’s perspective. German journalist and literary author Horst Stern shocked the nation with his TV program Remarks about the Stag (1971), which shows the brutality of hunting; his 1989 Jagdnovelle (The Last Hunt) weaves together a hunter’s perspective with his prey animal’s experience. In recent years, German forester Peter Wohlleben has shifted the focus from animals to plants by publishing a series of popular books about the forest, starting with The Hidden Life of Trees (2015). This essay examines how Salten, Stern, and Wohlleben all humanize their animal and plant characters, including through a form of “critical anthromorphism” (Mossner)—and are criticized for it. They also incorporate ethology, i.e. observations of animal behavior and the forest environment, as well as scientific knowledge, as they attempt to evoke their audience’s empathy for their nonhuman characters. Hunting pressure and the violent disruption of the lives of the animals leads to an “ecology of fear” instead of an “ecology of subjects” that would align better with changing perceptions of “nature” (Soentgen). Ethical questions concerning the mass killing of Europe’s largest mammals remain as it does not succeed in reducing deer overpopulation or damage to the forest ecosystem, perpetuing Germany’s forest/game conflict.

Response-Able Trees. On Permaculture Ethics of Responsibility in the Films of the Exhibition "Cambio" (2020)

2024-03-15T09:01:24+01:00

The extensive research project Cambio (2020) by the Italian designer duo Formafantasma focuses on the tree, the forest in its function of securing the existence of humans, animals and other plants. The project uses various forms of critical representation and storytelling to explore the connections between exploitation, consumer culture and colonialism in the face of the industrial timber industry. The question is: What responsibility do we bear in relation to the treatment of trees and what response-ability do trees themselves have? Based on three essayistic short films and other objects from the Cambio exhibition, my contribution addresses these questions of responsibility and respons-ability with regard to the relationship between humans and trees. In the sense of Donna Haraway, the what and how of artistic representation and narration itself becomes a question of response-ability - i.e. the possibility of becoming responsible in responding. Here, with Haraway in mind, the ethically necessary perspective unfolds of not having to distinguish between a real world and a world of stories and narratives, but of being able to think material-semiotic worlds in a (responsible) situated way and allow them to emerge. This paper proposes response-ability as a conceptual and analytical rubric and as a guiding ethical practice for the new materialist-inspired endeavor to rethink human and non-human interdependency in relation to trees. I will intruduce the exhibition Cambio and three of its films as an exemplary site of narrative and representational modes that have the potential to sensitize us to those relations of interdependency.

Encounters of Care: Technological Kin and Nonhuman Care

2024-03-15T10:23:48+01:00

Practices of care are not easily categorized. They are often embedded in encounters and interactions but are impossible to frame simply according to species boundaries or the supposedly positive or negative feelings they might elicit. This fluidity of care is also characterized by dualities and contradictions, forcing a reflection on who the participants in this caring network of ontologies are, and what the expected and often unexpected results of these interactions can be. This article explores possibilities of care beyond human agency. In a world in which the human is increasingly entangled with technology, practices of care are no longer only a human prerogative. Caring encounters between the technological other and the human become spaces for the redefinition of cross-species collaborations that defy anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Technological practices of care towards the human emphasize the emergence of symbiotic existences that disrupts the logic of a human centered approach to the nonhuman, challenging dominant ideas of merely gentle and positive care. Kawakami Hiromi’s Don’t Get Carried Away by Big Birds (2016) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) subvert the logic of anthropocentrism by describing practices of care enacted by technological others towards the human. In their awareness of the inherent complexities and contradictions embedded in nonhuman-human practices of care, they exemplify Elena Pulcini’s notion that fear for the world means an actual care for the world. The disruptive kinships between technology and the human epitomize the non-romanticized character of technological care. By choosing to avoid both technophobia and technophilia, the two novels express the awareness that human existence is always affected by contradictory but unavoidable encounters with the nonhuman other.

Weird Ghosts of the Anthropocene: The Spectral Encounter in New Weird Fiction as a Conceptual Metaphor for Ecocritical Theory

2024-03-15T08:20:34+01:00

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh links the reluctance of contemporary fiction to tackle the environmental crisis to the inadequacy of realism, with which Western “high” literature has been associated since the rise of the modern novel, to describe the “hyperobject” quality (Clark 140) of the Anthropocene. This paper argues that the genre labeled as New Weird, which strives to portray the Unheimlich, the eerie, or precisely the weird in our familiar reality, offers an answer to this aesthetic challenge, having found an especially powerful literary device in spectral encounters. In the works of New Weird author China Miéville, environmental concerns are often embodied by the encounter of human protagonists with the ghostly apparitions of non-human entities, from icebergs floating in the sky over London to a sunken oil platform re-emerging from the sea. A close reading of three stories from his collection Three Moments of an Explosion, “Polynia”, “Covehithe” and “Estate”, will show how Miéville’s portrayal of people’s behavior in encountering ‘weird’ spectral presences bear a specific ecological significance. This significance, which is common to many different authors of New Weird fiction, reverberates in the use of spectrality as a conceptual metaphor in contemporary ecocritical theory, thus corroborating the claim of this genre as the most productive for our historical times.

Book Review of "One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax"

2024-08-25T07:42:07+02:00

Book review of One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax.

Book Review of "Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene"

2024-08-07T18:06:22+02:00

Book review of Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene.

Book Review of "Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth"

2024-07-01T16:48:37+02:00

Book review of Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth.

Book Review of "Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry"

2024-07-12T23:53:48+02:00

Book review of Book Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry.

Book Review of "Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media"

2024-03-21T16:01:23+01:00

Book review of Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media.

Book Review of "Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts"

2024-08-14T13:50:56+02:00

Book review of Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts.

Book Review of "The Activist Humanist. Form and Method in the Climate Crisis"

2024-07-18T18:04:49+02:00

Book review of The Activist Humanist. Form and Method in the Climate Crisis.