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.

The Sea Was Ever a Sertão: Terra Incognita in Moby-Dick and Grande sertão: veredas

In this article, I read João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas as an extended contemplation of the Brazilian backlands region known as the sertão, comparing it with Herman Melville’s timeless novel Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, which I read in a similar vein (but with regard to the sea). In this analysis, sea and sertão overlap and become largely interchangeable. In doing so, I also comment on the importance of the way in which we conceive of nature in general, and of the sea and the sertão specifically. The article employs Jedediah Purdy’s idea of the environmental imagination and Steven Vogel’s concept of humility before nature as they relate to perceptions of the environment (and the world) through a literary lens. In short, my focus is on exploring how literary representations of nature can condition readers’ attitudes and behaviors toward it. After detailing the similarities between both narrators’ perceptions and descriptions of sea/sertão as incomprehensible spaces that invite narrators (and readers) to self-discovery, I discuss the potential effects these narratives can have in shaping readers’ perceptions of the environment and their relation to the world in which they live.

Zulu Poems of (and for) Nature: Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Environmental Imagination in Imvunge Yemvelo (1972)

Nature, climate crisis, and the Anthropocene have carved space in recent inter-, cross-, and multi-disciplinary humanities studies. In South Africa, such studies have barely touched literature in African languages. Nyambi and Otomo focus on the tropes of “lady nature,” nostalgia, and dystopia in Zulu writer Bhekinkosi Ntuli’s Imvunge Yemvelo to explore the complex ways in which these tropes test the normative epistemes of ecological crises. Beyond rejecting imperial distortions of indigenous environmentalism, Ntuli’s poems re-center local knowledge of nature in understanding its relationship with humans. That knowledge subverts epistemic structures of colonial conservation, revising and re-visioning racially geo-politicized knowledge hierarchies.

Envisaging Teacher Spatial Competency Through the Lenses of Situated Cognition and Personal Imagination to Reposition It as a Professional Classroom Practice Skill

This chapter examines the complex phenomenon of teachers’ spatial interactions in their learning environments. Its goal is to examine concepts and theories that might inform a working conceptual framework. Building on recent studies that question how school environments can influence teacher behaviour, spatial concepts as well as architectural and cognitive psychology theories are examined to explore the dynamic and mutually dependent relationship between teachers and learning spaces. A new concept of ‘situated environmental imagination’ is devised as a conceptual explanation for teacher spatial competency; it also provides practitioners with the means to evaluate and observe space-related skills in classroom action settings. This approach pursues a non-linear understanding and analysis of space and teacher practice that blends architectural and educational perspectives, resulting in an argument for the inclusion of spatial competency as an important professional skill that has the potential to enhance student learning.

“Sense of Place and Sense of Planet”: Local-Planetary Experiences of Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

Climate change has become a harsh reality of our present times. It is happening here, there, and everywhere unbound by the spatial and temporal dimensions. The vacillating impact of such a global crisis equally demands multiple and concurrent scales in order to accurately comprehend the complexity of the problem. Borrowing the title of my paper from Ursula K. Heise’s book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, where she proposes the concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’, this article aims at reflecting upon the globalization of the present ecocatastrophes, musing upon the local (the experiences of the working class people) and the global scale (Unnatural Migration and thereby extinction of the Monarch Butterflies) impact of the climate crisis. Ursula K. Heise believes that the ‘deterritorialization’ of the local knowledge is not always detrimental rather can open up new avenues into ecological consciousness. Giving consideration to a deterritorialised environmental vision my paper will fall back on Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior– a novel dealing with the eco-apocalypse, climate change and global warming. In providing a deeply humane account of the working people’s response to the local effects of the global crisis along with a poignant account of the impact on a planetary scale- the Migration of the Monarch Butterflies and their extinction, Kingsolver in this novel contextualizes the micro-geographically bounded human experience and memory within the larger context of the global Anthropocene thereby calling for a ‘sense of planet’ along with a ‘sense of place’- which get along with each other.