Bodily Transformations: Goethe and Mann in Venice

Using material ecocriticism, this essay considers how Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Italian Journey portray the experience of Venice’s watery boundaries as transformative of both one’s sense of the body and of body itself. Mann obsessively presents bodies in Death in Venice, including the impact of cholera on the body of his protagonist, Aschenbach, and the idealised form of the Polish boy Tadzio; yet his text also eludes portraying Aschenbach’s death in any graphic detail. In other words, bodies matter in Death in Venice but there appears to be an inappropriate and less bodily gradient for the impact of disease such that the bodies of the workers who succumbed to cholera are portrayed in horrific detail while Aschenbach just quietly falls asleep, transformed visibly only by cosmetics. Goethe, in turn, also embraces both a bodily focus in his Italian writings, and one that similarly looks away from gritty embodiment. His journal depicts more abstract and scientific details of non-human bodies that later shape his writings on botany, optics, and morphology. However, Goethe’s text presents a proto-ecological sense of natural bodies immersed in an animated, lively, and disturbing world of water and life, one clearly inspired by his study of the ocean and lagoon in Venice.

Theorising Material Ecocriticism: From Abstract to Concrete

The material-turn in the millennial period brought in newer insights in the understanding of the relationship between the material and its users. It would be interesting to explore the trajectory from this point, for the New Materialism that came about was founded on drawing from multifarious disciplines – natural sciences, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, history, geology and cultural studies. Today, the theoretical framework of Ecocriticism has adopted several tenets of New Materialism and has evolved into ‘Material Ecocriticism’. The present paper aims to study the latest development of ecocriticism in association with materialism, while paying particular heed to how ‘matter’ plays a pivotal role in constructing and communicating narratives. The study also looks at reading matter as an active agent in propelling any alterations in our relationship with nature. Along with a quick rereading of William Blake’s selected poems, the study proceeds to highlight the importance of accurate interpretations that could bring about considerable changes in our attitudes toward the environment.

Teaching Rivers. Environmental Learning mit dem Gedicht Dart von Alice Oswald im Fremdsprachlichen Englischunterricht

Seit einigen Jahren wandelt sich der Umgang mit den sog. Umweltthemen im fremdsprachlichen Englischunterricht, und zwar seitdem sie als gesamtgesellschaftlich relevant begriffen werden. Jedoch werden Umweltthemen häufig nur auf sprachlicher Ebene betrachtet, was häufig zu Frust bei Schüler*innen führt. Zudem sind sie meist verbunden mit moralischem Vorwurf und sozialer Erwünschtheit bzw. knüpfen sie kaum an die eigenen Erfahrungen an. Es zeigt sich jedoch, dass zunehmend das Potenzial für einen inter-/transkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht erkannt wird. Aber auch diese Entwicklungen zeigen, dass Umwelt nach wie vor als Objekt und Untersuchungsgegenstand betrachtet wird. Dabei wird ein traditioneller Zugang zu Natur und Umwelt sichtbar, der sich (mindestens) seit der Aufklärung zurückverfolgen lässt: Umwelt wird nicht als etwas begriffen, dessen Teil wir sind, sondern als Objekt, von dem wir getrennt sind und das man (objektiv) untersuchen, schützen (oder ausbeuten) kann. Als Ergänzung zu Nachhaltigkeitsthemen und (de)konstruktivistischen Untersuchungsformen von Natur im interkulturellen Kontext, sollten Schüler*innen die Möglichkeiten bekommen, einen Zugang zu dieser „Welt da draußen“ zu erfahren. In dem vorliegenden Artikel wird eine partizipatorische Ebene für das Arbeiten mit Umweltthemen im Englischunterricht entwickelt. Zentral dabei ist der Gedanke eines reading with the world. Ansätze aus dem Forschungsbereich Material Ecocriticism, aus der Phänomenologie und der Anthropologie geben Impulse für eine ecocritical practice, da sie, wenn auch aus völlig unterschiedlicher Perspektive, eine Subjekt-Objekt-Trennung aufbrechen. Zentraler Bestandteil einer partizipatorischen Ebene ist die Arbeit mit Poesie, die alternative Sprechweisen und Bildneuheiten eröffnen kann. Denn durch Poesie können Grenzen und Kategorien neu verhandelt werden. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Arbeit mit dem Langgedicht Dart von Alice Oswald. Hier fokussiert sich Oswald auf die wechselseitige Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Fluss. Das Gedicht ermöglicht einen alternativen Blick auf einen Fluss. Um diesen Zugang zu ermöglichen, wird eine rationale Textanalyse nicht ausreichen. Die partizipatorische Ebene strebt ein ganzheitliches Arbeiten auf kognitiver, emotionaler und sensomotorischer Ebene an

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

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.

The Smell of Risk

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

The introduction argues that modernization in the United States has been sustained by processes of differential deodorization that relocate undesirable airborne materials to vulnerable places and populations, and that the sense of smell has played an important role in sensing and staging how noxious air affects bodies, minds, and moods. Building on work in material ecocriticism, geography, race studies, and sensory studies, it develops an environmental framework for studying olfactory aesthetics in works of literature and conceptual art.

Bettering Our Stories about Stories about Nature

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.

Introduction

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.