Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

2024_Vol.15_Num.1_wholeissue

Gala Arias Rubio — 2024-04-26

Editorial 15.1

Heather Sullivan — 2024-04-26

Editorial 15.1

Credits 15.1

Irene Sanz Alonso — 2024-04-26

Credits 15.1

“Grump Mountain”: Viewers’ Attributions of Agency to a Climate Fiction Film

Heidi Toivonen — 2024-04-26

Environmental narratives—such as the genre of climate fiction—have been the topic of much theorization and discussion for their potential to enrich human ways of thinking about the nonhuman environment. In this paper, we discuss the responses of a small sample of participants who watched a short climate fiction narrative, the trailer to a documentary called Not Ok: A Little Movie about a Small Glacier at the End of the World. Using discourse analysis, we focus on how participants construct agency for the nonhuman narrator of the story—a mountain and former volcano named Ok that was once the site of Okjökull (Ok glacier). Participants’ responses reveal how simple nonhuman agency becomes woven into more complex constructions when the narrative form is discussed. Our analysis shows that only participants who took the perspective of the mountain narrator were able to attribute complex forms of agency to the figure of the mountain and the story it told. Participants who did not relate to Ok mountain as narrator relayed simpler forms of nonhuman agency. Representing nonhuman agency in the subject of the mountain and animating that figure with a human voice (of narration) is a particular narrative strategy; in this study, we were interested in understanding how such a figure might challenge simple tropes of nature’s agency and invite more complex ways of conceiving of nonhuman agency. The climate fiction/documentary trailer also led viewers to ponder the destructive anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman environments. Some participants took the material to be merely an environmental message without engaging the nonhuman narrative aspects. The anthropomorphizing of Ok mountain’s story, as in the video material in our case study, may, we argue, limit interaction-oriented accounts of the entanglement of (non)human agencies. Finally, we conclude, many participants’ tendency to understand environmental stories as (solely) moral messages presents a challenge to both climate fiction and narrative communications.

Narrating Loss in James Bradley’s "Clade" (2015); or, Introducing Arrested Narrative in Climate Fiction

Karoline Huber — 2024-04-26

In James Bradley’s futuristic novel of climate crises, Clade (2015), characters constructed to evoke empathy and readerly attachment, characters we expect to be further developed narratologically, are prone to sudden, unexpected and unexplained disappearances. The development of cared-for characters is thus ‘arrested’ at the level of narration. For readers, this is disarming and disconcerting. However, we find purpose in such acts of narratorial breakage in cli-fi like Clade. In contemporary stories of climate crises, which project environmental destruction, the loss of habitats and species, and severe disruption to human and nonhuman lives, the arrestation of a character’s development parallels a sense of environmental loss evoked at the level of storied content. Put another way, the sudden disappearance of character-story at the level of form imitates the sudden erasure of species, ecosystems and lived experience in the storyworld of Clade. We call such narratological innovation arrested narrative. In this essay we define and describe the appearance and function of arrested narrative in Clade, in some depth, as well as its emergence in two other novels of climate crises, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020). While investigations into narrative form in stories of the Anthropocene are not new, ecocritical literary scholarship remains largely focussed on story-level content. This examination of the way arrests in narrative discourse parallel environmental ruptures at the level of content, in selected cli-fi, is aimed at contributing to the emerging field of “econarratology” (James), concerned with the study of the workings of both form and content in ecocritical narratives.

Rhizomatic Permeabilities in the New Poetry of the Indian Partition

Juan Ignacio Oliva — 2024-04-26

This paper aims at tackling the memory of the Indian Partition (1947) from the viewpoint of new ecological materiality, that studies inclusively and interrelatedly the biological reality of the corporeality of territories and their inhabitants, on the one side; while being aware of the entropic kinetics of tense bodies and their holistic and rhizomatic permeabilities, on the other. To this purpose, a reduced bunch of poems from a much wider corpus generated by this turning point is chosen, written by women authors such as Prerna Bakshi, Sujata Bhatt, Adeeba Talukder and Moniza Alvi. It does not by any means pretend to be exhaustive because it would be impossible to globally visualize the enormous amount of traumatic facts, echoes, mirages, revisions and rereadings that the Partition brings about–a wide scar that opens and bleeds with ease—especially when all kind of events, workshops and memorials of the 70^th and the 75^th anniversaries are so close. Among the most relevant items there could be highlighted, firstly, the construction of landscape imagery mediated by fracture; secondly, the problematization of the various ideological exiles caused by the Partition; or, lastly, the material integration of cultural and identity realities, seen as physical and tangible facts susceptible to development and transformation.

Cosmo-poethics and Ecology of the Word. An Essay on Erri De Luca and Jean-Claude Pinson

Bertrand Guest — 2024-04-26

Published in 2013 and 2015 respectively, Jean-Claude Pinson's Poéthique (Poethics) and Erri de Luca's La parole contraria (The Contrary Word) question know-how, knowing how to say and knowing how to be, experimenting with a literature of the self in its environment, which is not distinct from life and its ethical choices. In the course of twenty years of reflection on poetry for Pinson, and more recently for De Luca, during his defence against the accusation of “incitement to sabotage” of the Lyon-Turin high-speed train, each of them sheds light in his essay on the question of what singular voices can do, of their possibility of living outside the dominant framework. In this way, they pose in a comparable way the question of an ecology of speech, starting again from the meaning of words to freely reinvent the world, a cosmo-poethical path that breaks with conformism, names the disagreements that separate it and could help to reshape the public space.

'Then We Build a System to Deal with It': Waste and the Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo’s "Underworld"

Jonathan Sarfin — 2024-04-26

Over twenty-five years after the publication of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld (1997), which depicts the shift from a naïve belief in technological progress at the beginning of the Cold War to disillusionment as it ended, the novel is more topical than ever, faced as we are with the growing recognition of the failure of both technorationality and capitalism to address humanity’s depredation and despoilment of the biosphere. This article argues that Underworld deploys David Nye’s notion of the technological sublime to depict the attempt to master recalcitrant nature, only to ironically reveal the impossibility of the endeavor. Underworld’s use of waste as a catalyst for the sublime is interesting precisely because waste connotes something valueless, whereas the sublime is occasioned by ‘great’, ostensibly valuable, things. Seen within its own logic, the technological sublime is a project of liberation, a vision of impending omniscience, a permanent deferral of human limitation. Yet when waste becomes sublime, the progression toward mastery does not proceed smoothly. Although the technological sublime “undermines all notions of limitation, instead presupposing the ability to continually innovate and to transform the world” (Nye 60), Underworld’s aestheticization represents it at its limit, when it can no longer regulate the abject threat of waste. Ultimately, I argue that DeLillo asks readers to grapple with abjection by dramatizing the failure of the technological sublime as an aesthetic strategy, which inadvertently reinscribes the boundaries that it seeks to override: the finitude of the embodied human, our relative powerlessness amongst the world within which we are enmeshed.

Breaking down the Thesis of Human Exception in French Novels of the 21st Century: Chevillard, Message and Brunel

Julia Ori — 2024-04-26

Starting from the book by Jean-Marie Schaeffer on the end of the human exception, it is analyzed how ontological dualism and ontic rupture—which postulate, respectively, the division of the human being and his separation from the rest of the world—are questioned in contemporary French novels. The corpus consists of three works that represent three different ends of the world with fantastic or science fiction elements: Sans l'orang-outan by Éric Chevillard from 2007, Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs by Vincent Message from 2016 and Les métamorphoses by Camille Brunel from 2020. It is studied how the traditional hierarchy of the myth of human exceptionality—human-reason above the animal-body—is broken in these stories: with the inversion of the hierarchical order in the case of Chevillard, with the displacement of the human down in the hierarchical order for Message and in the elimination of the hierarchy in Brunel's novel. It will also be shown that these changes can be observed at the level of isotopies as well, and specifically at that of isotopy breaks. Finally, the common element in these stories is the ecological commitment to animals and the reinterpretation of the place of the human beings on Earth: it is remembered that everyone, regardless of the species, is part of the same web of life.

Review Essay: Postcolonial Literatures and Climate Change

Kate Judith — 2024-04-26

Review essay.

Book Review of "Nature and Literary Studies"

Tom Hertweck — 2024-04-26

Book review of Nature and Literary Studies.

Book Review of "Los cien ecologismos: Una introducción al pensamiento ambiental"

Alejandro Rivero-Vadillo — 2024-04-26

Book review of Los cien ecologismos: Una introducción al pensamiento ambiental.

Book Review of "DH Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature"

Julia Kuznetski (née Tofantšuk) — 2024-04-26

Book review of DH Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature.

Book Review of "Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence"

Paromita Patranobish — 2024-04-26

Book review of Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence.

Book Review of "Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean"

Eleonor Botoman — 2024-04-26

Book review of Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean.

Book Review of "Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals"

Akshita Bhardwaj — 2024-04-26

Book review of Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals.

Book Review of "Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts"

Jacob Abell — 2024-04-26

Book review of Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts.

Plant Tendrils in Children's and Young Adult Literature. An Introduction

Melanie Duckworth — 2024-04-26

Introduction to the guest edited section.

“The Trees Got Their Own Ways to Hurt Us”: Entangled Bodies and Fragile Flesh in M.R. Carey’s "The Book of Koli" (2020)

Samantha Hind — 2024-04-26

There is a post-apocalyptic England teeming with violent plants, where one break in the clouds could wake the trees around you, condemning you to become sustenance for thirsty roots. This is the speculative future of M.R. Carey’s speculative young adult novel, The Book of Koli, where humans struggle to adapt to their new role in this speculative future and plants pose an ever-growing threat. In this article, I analyse how The Book of Koli engages with, what I term, “plant flesh,” through the analogous transformations of humans and plants. Plant flesh is a development of Michael Marder’s “grafts,” where he suggests that grafts are an expression of proliferation for both plants and flesh. With grafts, Marder illustrates the vegetality of flesh; with plant flesh, I illustrate both the vegetality of flesh and the fleshiness of the vegetal. Plant flesh, then, becomes a term of indistinction (as per Matthew Calarco), where, through plant flesh, we can begin to trace the ways that humans and animals are like plants. In The Book of Koli’s young adult context, plant flesh’s indistinction captures the shared and necessary – but oftentimes violent – transformation of flesh, as teen protagonist, Koli, transitions into adolescence alongside genetically modified plants and their evolution into speculative monstrosities. Through theoretical discussions and close readings, I argue that explorations of plant flesh in The Book of Koli serve to demonstrate both the shared, violent transformations of plant and human flesh and the indistinction that such transformations encourage between the adolescent Koli and the ever-evolving plants. The Book of Koli’s speculative young adult journey, then, with its botanical threats and adolescent transformations, makes apparent the indistinct zones that can emerge, when we tend to the entangled bodies and fragile flesh of both plants and humans.

Seeds of Change: Negotiating Hierarchies in Seed Picturebook Stories

Lizao Hu — 2024-04-26

How tiny seeds are represented in children’s literature has long eluded critical attention. Taking the seed story as a genre, this research first explores representative topoi and traditional constructions of agency in seed picturebook stories, which is well represented by Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971) and Eric Carle’s The Tiny Seed (1970). Building upon the identified traditions, it further investigates the possible renewal of the seed story in three contemporary picturebooks: Jen Cullerton Johnson’s Seeds Of Change: Planting a Path to Peace (2011), Jory John’s The Bad Seed (2017), and Cristiana Valentini’s Stay, Little Seed (2020). To interpret representations of seeds at visual and verbal levels of narratives, this study lies in critical plant studies and research on agency in children's literature from a multimodal perspective. I find that in addition to operating as eco-pedagogical or scientific motifs, highly individualized seeds as agentic beings are identified, particularly when there are metaphorical comparisons of seeds to children. The juxtaposition of seeds and children establishes a mechanism of mutual empowerment, which not only challenges “seed blindness” (a term I coin herein) in the anthropocentric paradigm, but also enhances children’s agentic capacities under adult normativity. Without demarcating clear generic boundaries, I argue that seed stories for children encompass various genres, including ecology fables, scientific accounts, modern fantasies, family stories, and Bildungsroman, which brings to light the dynamic relationships and hierarchies between seed, children, and adults. Although the dilemma of representing seeds as didactic tools or agentic beings remains, this study offers an alternative perspective that counters the perception of seeds and children as vulnerable and dependent on adult authority.

Survival, Sustenance, and Self-Sufficiency in a Tale of Two Sisters: Plant Geographies in Jean Hegland’s "Into the Forest"

Sara Pankenier Weld — 2024-04-26

As evidenced by its title, Into the Forest (1996) by Jean Hegland traces the movement of two adolescent girls ever further into the forest in a post-apocalyptic account of the near future. Set in Redwood, California, it depicts a world where trees are gigantic and long-lasting while humans are diminutive and diminishing, while contemporary human technological society has fallen apart. Plants, trees, and the forest, and an increasingly intimate and Indigenous knowledge and relationship with these, play a key and ever-growing role in the novel and illuminate its otherwise dark vision of the future. Ultimately, the sisters’ taking of an increasingly plant-based perspective offers an alternative trajectory and path toward survival, sustenance, and self-sufficiency for the two young women. Although not necessarily written for young adults exclusively, the novel, whose international impact is evidenced by the fact that translated into over a dozen languages, made into a film in Canada, and adapted as a graphic novel in French, focuses on young adult protagonists and tells a post-apocalyptic tale that is both dark and inspiring in its vision of self-sufficiency and reintegration with nature, forest, and plants. It thus shows itself to be a work of young adult literature in many respects, as well as in its implied ecofeminist critique of capitalist society and a more sustainable vision of the future represented by the young. This article examines various plant geographies in Into the Forest and the way in which the forest represents a space of refuge from mankind and society; provides healing and sustenance; serves as an alternative abode; and represents a birthplace of the future. It argues that an increasingly plant-based perspective figures centrally in the book’s narrative arc from beginning to end, from its title and setting to the trajectory of its unfolding plot, and in its conclusion and vision of the future.

"To See With Eyes Unclouded": Nonhuman Selves and Semiosis in "Princess Mononoke"

Cynthia Zhang — 2024-04-26

Responding to a robust archive of ecocritical work on science fiction, this paper argues for fantasy as a genre that can offer powerful tools for ecological thinking. Focusing on Miyazaki Hayao’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke, I argue that fantasy’s portrayal of an animistic natural world provides a framework for recognizing and respecting the subjectivity of nonhuman persons. Drawing on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinatural personhood, this paper analyzes the ways in which animistic fantasy allows Miyazaki to portray plants, animals, and other nonhumans as agential subjects that must be respected. Further, using Eduardo Kohn’s work on the materiality of semiosis to examine instances of cross-species communication in Princess Mononoke, I argue that the film’s expanded conceptions of personhood and language counter anthropocentric narratives of mastery by portraying human knowledge as necessarily limited and incomplete. In turn, the acknowledgement of epistemological limits encourages an ethical attitude which resonates with Michael Marder’s description of plant-thinking as a mode that acknowledges the importance of the unknown and the unknowable. Ultimately, this paper calls for a consideration of how modes of thought and aesthetic representation that have traditionally fallen outside the purview of the scientific can offer resources for imagining human-nonhuman relations.

Seeds of latent hope: The figurative entwinement of children, adolescents, and plants in Maja Lunde’s "The Dream of a Tree"

Lykke Guanio-Uluru — 2024-04-26

Drawing on theorizations of climate fiction, previous studies of plants in climate fiction (cli-fi) for young adults, perspectives from critical plant studies, and discussions on the symbolism of seeds and trees, this study traces metaphorical relationships between plants and the child- and adolescent characters in Maja Lunde’s latest climate fiction, The Dream of a Tree (Drømmen om et tre, 2022). The novel is the last volume in Lunde’s “climate quartet”, where she, for the first time in her series, employs a young adult protagonist. The plot revolves around a group of children, stranded on the archipelago of Svalbard that hosts the Global Seed Vault. The study aims to show how the child and adolescent characters in Lunde’s climate fiction are embedded in metaphorical patterns associating them with growth and hope in ways that serve to move Lunde’s climate quartet from a dystopian towards a more utopian resolution.

Living and Dying as Compost in the Torne Valley Mires

Lydia Kokkola — 2024-04-26

This article takes Donna Haraway’s claim that “We are compost” as a literal statement. Combining Human-Plant Studies (HPS) with the study of children’s literature, the article examines a novel set in the European Arctic as starting point for imagining what it means to live as compost. In the novel, Som om jag inte fanns [As though I wasn’t there] by Kerstin Johansson i Backe, a grieving girl, Elina, seeks out her father’s spirit in a sphagnum bog. The article draws parallels between Elina’s actions and storying activities in the mire and human-moss relationships. These relationships are reflected against indigenous ways of understanding the meshing of the worlds of the living and dead, as well as the meshing of humans with other living organisms. In doing so, it opens up a richer understand of human-plant relations, but also points out the risks of becoming one with the world

Unlikely Friends in Patriarchal Lands: An Ecofeminist Reading of Rajasthani Folktale “Sonal Bai”

Sushmita Pareek — 2024-04-26

"Sonal Bai" is a popular folktale about a girl told by women in Rajasthani-speaking areas of north India to initiate young girls into adulthood. This paper investigates the metaphorical representation of a girl’s coming of age through her relationship with a Sandalwood tree analysing, "Sonal Bai" as an ecofeminist text. The story renders voice to socially prohibited themes of menstruation and women’s sensual desire as embodied in silent friendship between a sandalwood tree and Sonal (girl with golden hair). The paper highlights how the outwardly simple tale of “Sonal Bai” is in fact an encoded lesson for teenage girls, inverted as a relationship between two highly treasured “belongings”/ “commodities”—sandalwood and a unmarried girl—in a patriarchal society economically dependent on agriculture. The sandalwood tree is highly valuable for farmers; different parts of the tree are used to produce furniture, oil, fragrance and food items. It is also a part of religious rituals where its essence is used as tilak on idols in Hindu traditions. Rajasthani Language is spoken prominently in the desert regions of India (Thar Desert) and the existence of such a tree in a desert is as precious and rare as a girl with golden hair. The paper draws reference from recurrent invocation of olfactory senses of the listeners captured by the images of the sandalwood tree in the story. It also explores use of growth metaphors using ‘rhizome’ like imagery of sandalwood branches reaching the sky which become an escape route for a teenage girl hiding from her family. The temporal and spatial indicators are infused together in the story of Sonal Bai leading to an unlikely friendship between two prized possessions that eventually breaks with the arrival of a patriarchal archetype: a handsome young prince. This study discusses the prevalent katha culture in India where women exercise freedom of voice through singing and narrating tales within all-female groups. This site of independent feminine interaction in a highly patriarchal society is investigated using Bakhtin’s “Chronotope” to highlight culturally encoded lessons in folktales meant for young girls in Indian society as a means of informal education.

Editorial

Elizabeth Tavella — 2024-04-26

Editorial

The Nettle Spinner

Wendy Wuyts — 2024-04-26

Definitive illustrations for "The Nettle Spinner" by Wendy Wuyts.

Meaning Making from Memories and Imagination from Plants

Bijal Vachharajani — 2024-04-26

Creative work with illustrations.