scholarly journals The Dark Pastoral: Material Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1 (2)) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Heather I. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Material Ecocriticism

scholarly journals Narrating a Valley in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän: Material Agency, Rain, and the Geologic Past

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Kiley M. Kost
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Temporal Scale ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
Material Agency ◽  
With Memory

The complex narrative composition of image and text in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän discloses entanglements between humans and nonhuman entities that impact the narrative and that demand careful consideration. The story depicts the aging protagonist’s struggle with memory loss and his careful examination of the valley’s mountain formations in fear of a landslide. In this analysis, I show that both of these threats can be read as entangled with nonhuman agents. By focusing on the material dimension of the text, two central and related shifts occur: the background element of rain becomes foregrounded in the narrative, and the natural formations of the valley that are assumed to be static are revealed to be dynamic. These shifts lead to an interpretation of Frisch’s text focused on the impacts of rain and the temporal scale of the text’s geologic dimension. Approaching the text through the lens of material ecocriticism unveils the multiple agencies at play, decenters the human, and illustrates the embodied experience of climate change.

scholarly journals Bettering Our Stories about Stories about Nature

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-207
Author(s):  
Dolly Jørgensen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
Museum Displays ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Text Types

      Both environmental historians and ecocriticism scholars are in the business of simultaneously analysing the stories we tell about the human-nature relationship and creating those stories. Using the case of Kiki, an Aldabra giant tortoise on display in the Muséum national d’Historie naturelle in Paris, I present three potential text types in museum displays which lend themselves to new ecocritical readings: museum labels, biographical displays, and material remains. Ecocritical approaches to the genres of scientific texts and animal biographies and the developing field of material ecocriticism prove useful for making sense of the complex narratives of environmental history. Reaching out to ecocriticism approaches can make the stories I tell as an environmental historian better.

scholarly journals Review Essay: Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature about the “New Materialisms” and its Impact on Ecocritical Theory

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serenella Iovino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Four Books

This bibliographic essay illustrates the proliferation of studies about the "new materialisms" and examines the potential influx of this conceptual trend on ecocriticism. In the discussion, in particular, I provide a comparative analysis of four books: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

The Smell of Risk

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsuan L. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Indigenous Plants ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
Environmental Materials ◽  
Racial Discourses

The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental justice narratives, and olfactory art. These texts reframe modernization as a regime of differential deodorization that relocates bad air and its associated noxious odors to vulnerable spaces and populations even as it derecognizes olfaction as a mode of embodied knowledge. The Smell of Risk brings insights from the fields of material ecocriticism, sensory studies, atmospheric geography, and critical race studies to bear on diverse contexts of atmospheric disparity, including Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ responses to racial discourses about Asiatic odors, and writings that explore the atmospheric devastation of settler colonialism and the olfactory capacities of Indigenous plants.

Introduction

Peak Pursuits ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Caroline Schaumann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human World ◽  
Hands And Feet ◽  
Intimate Exchange

This chapter presents a Humboldtian history of mountaineering in the long nineteenth century and reviews the scientific progress and aesthetic reverence that became available through the embodied experience of the mountaineer. It mentions scholars Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz who defined the central premise of Anthropocene as challenges that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West. It also looks into Stacy Alaimo's observation of transcorporeal interchanges, which considers climbing mountains as a creative and performative undertaking. The chapter deals with recent theories of material ecocriticism that conceptualize mountaineering as an intimate exchange between the human and more-than-human world. It also emphasizes how mountaineering can become a creative act of perceiving the world with one's hands and feet.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document