Imagining Rivers: The Aesthetics, History, and Politics of American Waterways. A Conversation Between Lawrence Buell and Christof Mauch

This contribution features a transatlantic conversation between Christof Mauch, environmental historian and Americanist from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Lawrence Buell, literary scholar and “pioneer” of Ecocriticism from Harvard University. Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) marked the first major attempt to understand the green tradition of environmental writing, nonfiction as well as fiction, beginning in colonial times and continuing into the present day. With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, this seminal book provided an account of the place of nature in the history of Western thought. Other highly acclaimed monographs include Writing for an Endangered World (2001), a book that brought industrialized and exurban landscapes into conversation with one other, and The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2009), which provides a critical survey of the ecocritical movement since the 1970s, with an eye to the future of the discipline.

Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction

Biblical apocalypse has long been a source of contention in environmental criticism. Typically, ecocritical readings of Biblical apocalypse rely on a definition of the genre focused on eschatological themes related to species annihilation precipitated by the judgement of the world and the end of time. In this article, we offer an alternative engagement with Biblical apocalypse by drawing on Christopher Rowland and Jolyon Pruszinski’s argument that apocalypse is not necessarily concerned with temporality. Our case study is The Book of Enoch. We compare natural history in Enoch to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological analysis of Biblical apocalypse as a way of seeing the world that worries human assumptions about the nature of things and thereby instigates an “anamorphosis” of perception. Following Timothy Morton’s adaptation of Marion’s idea of anamorphosis as an example of the ecological art of attention, we show how apocalypse achieves “anamorphic attention” by encouraging the cultivation of specific modes of perception—principally, openness and receptivity—that are also critical to political theology. In turn, this analysis of anamorphic attention will inform our rethinking of the relationship between environmentalism and apocalyptic themes in climate fiction today, with special reference to Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From.

Border Country: Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Ireland

The spatial turn in Ireland has emerged from a focus on postcolonial discourse, a historical model that critiques the inequalities inherent in Irish modernity. A focus on place as a means of establishing identity, particularly within the context of colonial and imperialist narratives, led to a dynamic discourse on literary representations of the environment in Irish studies depicting fraught relationships between land and scarcity. And yet, there was resistance to engaging with ecocriticism on a systematic level, as Eóin Flannery observes, “the field of Irish cultural studies has yet to exploit fully the critical and analytical resources of ecological criticism” (2012: 6). Previously, the discourse of space and place has been in the service of Irish cultural studies: how has our relationship with place made Ireland what it is today? One of the interesting aspects of the intervention of ecocriticism in the field of Irish studies is how much of ecocriticism is still in the trawl of the cultural implications for the environment. This article will examine the emergence of Irish studies and ecocritical discourse in recent years and explore the dynamic between post-colonialism and environmental criticism with respect to the Irish canon.

Ecocriticism in Turkey

Ecocriticism has gained visibility in Turkish academia in the early 2000s. This essay offers a brief analysis of the status of the field in Turkey and sheds light on the growing interest in ecology in both academic and non-academic circles. I first overview the academic conventions and publications that provided the initial momentum for the birth of Turkish ecocriticism. I examine past and current trends in ecocritical studies by surveying the latest academic publications, literary works and traditions that lend themselves to ecocritical analyses, and specific ecological questions pertinent to Turkey’s geography. I then address future directions for research in the field and investigate the expanding interest in ecology across different disciplines such as film, visual arts and media. I conclude the essay by highlighting the interdisciplinary platforms that bring together researchers and practitioners to enable new forms of environmental criticism and activism at a time of immense neoliberal growth.

Environmental Criticism in Kulah's Short Story Gus Tf Sakai's Work: An Overview of Ecocritics

Literary work is not born from an empty thing. It was born from the results of human hands on the other hand interacting and absorbing many things from the complexity of the environment in which it lives. This explains how a literary work has an intimate relationship with nature. Literary ecology exists as a bridge to understand how nature is placed in a work. The object of this research is Kulah's short story written by Gus Tf Sakai. Kulah's short story contains a lot of environmental criticism that is very strongly illustrated. Through interpretation efforts and descriptions when approaching the data in the form of quotations of words or sentences taken in my short story. Ecological theory tries to explain how humans and nature influence each other as an ecosystem. Some of the environmental criticisms contained in kulah short story are criticisms of the deteriorating condition of the watershed which has resulted in many disasters such as floods, massive forest loss, and the dangers of waste which must be a concern for all parties. Efforts to prevent damage to nature must be taken in various ways including through the literary path. Environmental damage is the beginning for other disasters, therefore the effort to understand literature through natural perspectives becomes very important and crucial. Ecological’s point of view when reading literature are expected to be one of the educational solutions for readers in order to take part in protecting nature.

“Each Unbearable Day”: Narrative Ruthlessness and Environmental and Reproductive Injustice in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones tells the story of Esch Batiste and her family in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Ward represents Esch’s unexpected pregnancy and the environmental degradation of her rural Mississippi Gulf Coast home as linked by the slow, quotidian forms of violence and risk exposure that characterize Jasbir K. Puar’s formulation of debility. Through scenes of reproductive and environmental injustice, Salvage the Bones elucidates the processes through which racially inflected political-economic systems unevenly produce debility in certain populations and environments while capacitating others. When put in conversation with critical race theory, critical disability theory, and environmental criticism, Salvage the Bones emphasizes the logics that underpin debility rather than sensationalizing or pathologizing its consequences. In its refusal to revert to ableist, racist literary codes and conventions, the novel theorizes and practices “narrative ruthlessness,” Ward's description of her literary strategy to respond to debility’s representational conundrums of inevitability and invisibility. In so doing, narrative ruthlessness exceeds liberal humanist impulses to propose restoration, cure, or uplift as desirable solutions, insisting instead on kinship, care, redress, and salvage as possibilities for radical survival and futurity.

Refining memory: Sugar, oil and plantation tourism on Louisiana’s River Road

This article explores the contemporary mediation of memory at two plantation heritage sites on Louisiana’s River Road. These sites, I argue, are systematically ‘refining’ cultural memories of African American enslavement, in a metaphorical echo of the industrial processing of commodities (oil and sugar) which takes place in the same landscape. The essay draws on initial informal ethnographic fieldwork at Oak Alley (the most-visited River Road plantation) and St Joseph (a working plantation) in 2015. I identify ways in which curatorial direction, guided tours and visitor facilities at each site elide the reality of slave sugar production. The results of this fieldwork are considered in light of a range of existing literature on contested heritage and environmental criticism, enabling a provisional contextualisation of ‘refined’ memory-making within the broader socio-economic and environmental context of River Road.