Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/ <p><em>Ecozon@</em> is a journal devoted to ecocriticism. Its principal aim is to further the study, knowledge and public awareness of the connections and relationship between literature, culture and the environment. One of its primary characteristics is that of reflecting the cultural, linguistic and natural richness and diversity of the European continent. The journal, co-founded in 2010 by Dr. Carmen Flys Junquera and the GIECO research group, is published by the University of Alcalá, Spain and sponsored by EASLCE. </p> en-US <p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:<br><br>a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a&nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" target="_new">Creative Commons Attribution License</a>&nbsp;that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal (CC BY-NC for articles and CC BY-NC-ND for creative work, unless author requests otherwise.</p> <p>b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</p> <p>c) Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</p> ecozona.secretary@gmail.com (Ecozon@ Secretary) Ecozona.assist.ed.tech@gmail.com (Ecozon@ Technical Support) Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:39:48 +0200 OJS 3.3.0.6 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Whole Issue 14.1 https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5112 <p>Whole issue 14.1</p> Gala Arias Rubio Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5112 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Ocean Acidification as a Hyperobject: Mediating Acidic Milieus in the Anthropocene https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4326 <p>Through the usage of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects (2013) as a heuristic, this essay aims to portray how Ocean Acidification can be read as a hyperobject affecting tropical seawaters and beyond. Furthermore, it illustrates how the arts and humanities, through their hermeneutical gaze, might help us grasp Ocean Acidification as a hyperobject and the wide array of other objects that act upon each other in such acidic oceanic waters. In this task, the article will close-read the <em>Underwater Woman</em> set of pictures by Christine Ren (2018) understanding the interpretation of art as a tool to reconnect cognition and emotion to move from the understanding of a crisis to the feeling of such crisis. Finally, it aims to shed light upon the implications arising from considering Ocean Acidification as a hyperobject. By connecting the theoretical, visual and political in the same narrative, this essay highlights the transformative potential of interpretation and thinking through hyperobjects. With this, the challenges of the Anthropocene are put at the forefront, situating specific events and problematics in a planetary scale.</p> Oriol Batalla Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4326 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 The Contribution of Literature to the Composition of a "common world": Marlen Haushofer's "The Wall" and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "Minotaurus" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4714 <p>In the context of the current environmental crisis and Covid-19 pandemic, as it is becoming increasingly urgent to “rethink the relationships between human and non-human beings” (Philippe Descola), this paper offers a comparative reading of two works of German-language literature, both published, within a space of twelve years, during the Cold War: <em>Die Wand</em> (1963) by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer and <em>Minotaurus: Eine Ballade</em> (1985) by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In these two narratives, I will focus on the way communities are made and unmade, on what Marielle Macé has defined as “the grammar of attachments”. How do words, especially personal pronouns, convey the process by which beings connect one to the other, and are the connections made solid and harmonious ones? Do these two works manage to give rise to a community of living, human and non-human entities? This paper will examine the role of literature in building “a common world” (Bruno Latour), asking whether the scripts outlined in the two books can raise “active hope” (Joanna Macy) and what they teach us about the history of the concept of nature in a time of great environmental change.</p> Aurélie Choné Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4714 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Editorial 14.1 https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5096 <p>Editorial 14.1</p> Heather Sullivan Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5096 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Gardening (against) the Anthropocene. An Introduction https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5085 <p>Introduction to the guest edited section.</p> Catriona Sandilands, Catrin Gersdorf Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5085 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Gardening the Planet: Literature and the Reimagining of Human/Nature Relations for the Anthropocene https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4877 <p>Gardening as an activity characterised by attentiveness to nature and willingness to adapt to and care for it, and the idea of gardening the planet are attracting growing interest in the context of debates on the Anthropocene. Garden writing exists in forms ranging from autobiographically framed essays describing plants and their care to prose fiction and even poetry. This article is concerned with its contribution to reimagining human/nature relations in a way which is particularly relevant in the Anthropocene: <em>homo hortensis</em> is a conception of humanity as an integral part of nature, dwelling actively in it and enhancing it rather than consuming or destroying it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s <em>Julie or the New Heloise</em> (1761) and Adalbert Stifter’s <em>Indian Summer</em> (1857–9) are examined as Early Anthropocene novels which anticipate through the gardens they depict aspects of Anthropocene thinking which find more explicit formulation in Michael Pollan’s work of nonfiction garden writing, <em>Second Nature</em> (1991).</p> Axel Goodbody Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4877 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Taboo Ecologies: Material and Lyric Dispossession in Anne Spencer’s Garden and Seed Catalogs https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4890 <p>Harlem Renaissance poet and gardener Anne Spencer drew inspiration from both her garden and reading. In a poem entitled “Taboo,” Spencer described reading “garden and seed catalogs, Browning, Housman, Whitman […] oh anything…” and, in doing so, asserted the significance of her catalogs alongside literary works as inspiration for her poetry. The poem as a whole describes how Black women evade the Jim Crow South through covert activities like reading which for Spencer, importantly included garden and seed catalogs. Where Spencer’s poetry and garden have been the subject of academic research, her catalogs have yet to receive the same scholarly attention. This paper argues that by placing garden and seed catalogs in the same category of taboo reading as canonical poets and conventional forms of journalism, Spencer aligns the botanical with the literary as a form of resistance. The seed catalogs Spencer engaged with reveal a long history of racism in the cultivation and naming of garden plants. This paper examines the history of seed catalogs, showing how the naming of plants is a continuation of the racist logic of possession, reflected in the naming of plants by stripping the plant of its previous context and replacing it with the names of colonial scientists and racial slurs. Spencer’s poetic insistence on dispossession, the literal and metaphorical disembodiment and ejection from property, pushes against conceptions of ownership over the natural world in that it subverts the racist logic of possession. I contend that Anne Spencer actively intertwined histories by drawing on catalogs, poetry, and gardening to create new ecologies in the spaces between reading and writing, lyrical and material. The new ecology of Spencer’s garden far exceeds a place where plants are grown but rather becomes a space that blooms through the material, the lyrical, and social spaces, leaving behind instead a living archive of rebellion.</p> Jordan Angel Norviel Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4890 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 (Re)creating a Living Memorial: Urban Gardening as a Multispecies Co-creating Practice https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4830 <p>This essay explores what happened when I recreated an allotment in the style of the year 1918. The plot was located on a charity allotment site in the city of Oxford in the United Kingdom and cultivated during the growing season of 2020 to2021. There have been people growing on the site for over a century. I planted open pollinated non-hybrid heritage seeds from the era. Reflecting on the use of landscape as an archive, I use both academic and creative responses to the soil as a repository of memory. The plot itself became a living memorial that diverse members of the public visited, to share food and engage with the plot and the themes it generated. These themes were the current COVID-19 pandemic, the 1918/1919 flu pandemic, and the First World War in Africa and Europe. In contrast to contested public memorials, the allotment garden space facilitated restoration. This essay therefore examines what can be enabled through a co-creating a multispecies gardening practice. It discusses whether the inclusion of nature enables a different engagement with challenging histories. By working with a store of memory within the natural world, the case study of the 1918 allotment demonstrates the ways in which it is possible to transcend both time and space, to open up counter narratives of key periods in global history. The 1918 allotment also offers up a methodological approach that works with the practice of decolonisation as “convivial” (Nyamnjoh). A meeting place for varied peoples and more-than-human others to come together in transformation, through urban gardening and working alongside and with more-than-human gardeners.</p> JC Niala Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4830 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 "Le Jardin d’Allah": Ecological Sensibilities in the Francophone Caribbean https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4826 <p>When gardening and Caribbean islands are mentioned, one cannot but think of Jamaica Kincaid and of the way in which she has articulated the complex relationship between colonialism and gardens, between people and notions such as place and situatedness. The very idea of nature in the Caribbean is strongly connoted, bearing the brunt of age-old associations with exoticism, mystery, unpredictability, or even madness. The symbolic meanings gardens take on in this region are therefore numerous and multifaceted, and if some have been lengthily discussed, others might still be worth exploring. Such is the case of backyards and vegetable gardens in Maryse Condé’s <em>En Attendant la Montée des Eaux</em>: in a violence-torn, poverty-afflicted, and politically unstable Haiti, the orphaned Movar makes people’s lives more bearable by recreating beauty around them, and by giving order to their unruly surroundings. His actions are more than a simple imposition of man over nature, they are also a metaphoric restoration of a lost balance, long forgotten because of other men’s blind exploitation of both human and natural resources in an environment rendered all the more fragile by its fluctuating weather patterns. This paper presents some considerations on Caribbean soil ecologies, with a particular focus on Guadeloupe and Haiti, and on the ways in which the gardener-garden relationship might contribute to restoring damaged ecosystems. Through the character of Movar and the Jardin d’Allah he tends to, concepts such as care time, reciprocal gardening and plant agency are explored. The precarious contexts in which acts of gardening take place allow for the words of Maryse Condé to be read as a paradigm for finding rootedness and balance in a politically, socially, and ecologically suffering world. Finally, Movar’s story is translated on a global scale, as an effective model of social sustainability and responsibility.</p> Chiara Lanza Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4826 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 “I am not by any stretch a gardener, just curious”: Feminist Gentrifier Memoirs and an Ethics of Urban Gardening https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4876 <p>Even though the texts that this article refers to as “feminist gentrifier memoirs” are not exclusively examples of garden writing, their feminist writers’ gardening practices feature prominently to explore their conflicted position in a gentrifying neighborhood and the networks of care that form out of neighborly interactions over the garden. Drawing on urban studies in the social sciences and humanities, literary studies, and environmental humanities, the article turns to Anne Elizabeth Moore’s <em>Gentrifier </em>(2021) and Vikki Warner’s <em>Tenemental</em> (2018) as prominent engagements with the complex emotions caused by their writers’ white privilege, homeownership, and complicity in processes of displacement and real estate speculation. These texts employ modes and affordances of garden writing, feminist memoir, urban memoir, and gentrification fiction. The article further considers the ways they are influenced by the activism of community gardening and benefit from sustainability measures of cities, including urban farms and gardens (summarized under the keywords green or environmental gentrification).</p> Maria Sulimma Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4876 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 The Dirt Witches’ Counter-narrative: A Response to Murray Bail’s "Eucalyptus" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4872 <p>Murray Bail’s 1998 novel <em>Eucalyptus</em> is an exposition of land ownership, plant classification and human-land relations, using a fairy tale structure. Bail uses parodic excess to deftly undermine settler preoccupations and European traditions that have historically been transposed onto the Australian bush. However, upon a second reading twenty-four years after the first, this author detected an absence of decolonial context in the book, relative to the time of publication, and an unintended reinforcement of misogyny that requires fresh interrogation. This author’s own work as a member of a Dirt Witch collective presents as a dovetailed creative object—an urban forest artwork 2021—and allows a witchy reading of Bail’s 1998 book and more contemporary attempts to redress colonial failures. It also allows an interrogation of the way the novel re-stereotypes Australian women on the land, re-oppresses both land and women and reinforces the very misogyny it was purported to expose.</p> Prudence Gibson Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4872 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Sensing Scale in Experimental Gardens: Un-Lawning with Silphium Civic Science https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4831 <p>Gardening experiments are timely in the context of what many now call the Anthropocene, an era that highlights questions of how humans collectively relate to the larger Earth systems in which we are embedded. In <em>Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept</em>, Timothy Clark reflects on the “unreadability” of the Anthropocene. He invites ecocritics to address this challenge by practicing “scale framing,” reading texts in variable and increasingly broad scales, and engaging the contradictions that emerge. We applied a scale framing approach to a story of relationships with <em>Silphium integrifolium</em> in an experimental gardening project. Silphium is a native North American perennial prairie plant being domesticated as a future oilseed crop. We are researchers and participants in a civic science project, in which individual garden sites are designed to collect data on and conserve silphium ecotypes while being linked into a wider network. In particular, we analyzed a civic science video story created by Ellie Irons called “Un-Lawning with Silphium.” Through our ecocritical analysis, we generated a framework to visualize nested and cross-scalar relationships in gardening projects. This framework could help inform the design and assessment of experimental gardening projects that feature the arts and humanities (e.g., digital narratives, ecocriticism, and pedagogy) and connect them with the natural and social sciences (e.g., plant breeding, botany, geography, and ecology) through transdisciplinary and participatory research methodologies for public engagement (e.g., civic science). We found that civic science gardening with silphium, and other gardening experiments in the Anthropocene, can guide public sensory engagements with scale, help spark recognition and investigation of contradictory scale effects, and motivate us to imagine and build relationships of caring responsibility.</p> Aubrey Streit Krug, Ellie Irons, Anna Andersson Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4831 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Gardening the Symbiocene: Andrea Zanzotto’s and Daria Menicanti’s Poetic Hospitability https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4828 <p>This essay explores the weaving together of vegetal and elemental narratives through the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto and Daria Menicanti and shows how their experience of the landscape is punctuated by cross-species encounters, a radical openness to the world, the belief in the common roots of all life, and the embrace of vulnerability in interactions with others. Starting from the premise that these poets comprehend that an emphasis on verbality reflects the anthropic desire to translate life into a one-species code and constitutes an impediment to universal and meaningful communication, this essay argues that Zanzotto’s and Menicanti’s embrace of the nonverbality of plant communication becomes key in the process of meaning-making. A narration of and with plants is the antidote to what they understand as the ultimate malady of language that prevents it from grasping and conveying the richness of the world after it has supplanted the nonhuman domain. Through a close reading of four poems that illustrates how the poets embrace the eloquent silences, gaps, hesitations, and overabundance of meaning of the vegetal realm, this essay foregrounds the boundary-breaking quality of Zanzotto’s and Menicanti’s poetry as a space for rich human-nonhuman exchanges. Ultimately, this essay argues that by declining to place themselves above plants and exert power over them, Zanzotto and Menicanti usher in the Symbiocene, the era characterized by multispecies coexistence, mutual support, and interdependence. Their poetry creates spaces where the human can lean into the more-than-human and, for one brief instant, get a taste of existing in harmony with the life that pulsates all around.</p> Serena Ferrando Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4828 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Review Essay. Energy in Crisis: New Perspectives on Petrocultures https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4933 <p>Review essay.</p> Katie Ritson Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4933 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Review Essay. Creativity and Resistance in the Age of Waste https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4922 <p>Review essay.</p> Pamela Phillips Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4922 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Book Review of "The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4891 <p>Book review of<em> The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene</em>.</p> Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4891 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Book Review of "Die Pflanzenwelt im Fokus der Environmental Humanities. Le végétal au défi des Humanités environnementales" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4901 <p>Book review of <em>Die Pflanzenwelt im Fokus der Environmental Humanities. Le végétal au défi des Humanités environnementales.</em></p> Stefan Hecht Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4901 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Book Review of "Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4904 <p>Book review of <em>Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media.</em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> Mònica Tomàs White Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4904 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Book Review of "Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4892 <p>Book review of<em> Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations.</em></p> Caroline Granger Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4892 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Book Review of "Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4945 <p>Book review of <em>Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity</em>.</p> Marco Caracciolo Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4945 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Credits 14.1 https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5087 <p>Credits 14.1</p> Irene Sanz Alonso Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5087 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Editorial https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5079 <p>Editorial.</p> Elizabeth Tavella Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5079 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Rewilding Suburbia in the American Plains https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5063 <p>In a time of mass extinction and climate change, every plant in a design urban garden matters. For me, as a garden designer, that means using native plant in sync with local wildlife. The hope is that using plants wildlife recognize will, in some cases, help both fauna and flora adapt to changes. My designs are meant to bridge the wild prairie, most now gone, and the traditional aesthetic concerns of urban dwellers. As wildness is brought back into our lives through all five senses, we gain appreciation for other species and, in turn, may begin to advocate for them and their wellbeing -- as our wellbeing is tied to plants, birds, insects, spiders, and more.</p> Benjamin Vogt Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5063 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Multispecies Care in the Urban Gardening Practices in Finland https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5055 <p>No abstract.</p> Agnese Bankovska Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5055 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 A Big Gay Garden: Cultivating Collective in Str*ke Time https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5065 <p>No abstract.</p> dp patrick Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5065 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Poem https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4889 <p>Poem.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> Mary Newell Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4889 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 From "Erbario" https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4712 <p>Poems.</p> Antonello Borra Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4712 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Walnut https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4245 <p>A poem about an eastern American black walnut tree.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> William Bond Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4245 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 Fiddleheads https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4651 <p>A poem in six parts tracing the natural history of fiddleheads, also known as Ostrich ferns, <em>Onoclea struthiopteris</em> or <em>Matteucia struthiopteris</em>: a plant native to northeastern North America (Turtle Island) and a traditional food.</p> Elizabeth Bolton Copyright (c) 2023 Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment https://ecozona.eu/article/view/4651 Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200