Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Category: Arcadiana

  • Gr/ecocriticism: A Conversation with Nikoleta Zampaki

    Gr/ecocriticism: A Conversation with Nikoleta Zampaki

    © Miltos Gikas

    This series wants to know what contemporary ecocritical research is like – what people are working on, and how they’re doing it. We’re asking PGRs and ECRs from across the world to discuss their work with us, reflecting on the ways in which their social and cultural contexts influence their understanding of what they do. We’ll ask our contributors for a short biography and starting proposition, and then open space for a conversation.

    Dr Nikoleta Zampaki is a Post-doc Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was Instructor at the Utah University in the U.S.A. Her disciplines are Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is editor and reviewer at many journals overseas, Associate and Managing Editor at the Journal of Ecohumanism, and current member of Education Team of NASA, V.I.N.E.-Glenn Research Center. She has also participated in many conferences and she is a multilingual student by working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Maori, and Turkish. She is also co-editor with Professor Peggy Karpouzou of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield, and “Environmental Humanities” at TPLondon based in the U.K.

    Nikoleta is in conversation with Arcadiana co-editor Milo Harries.

    MH:

    So, Nikoleta, what’s your starting proposition?

    NZ:

    To speak of Environmental Humanities in Modern Greek Studies is at the same time a way to speak of the future of Modern Greek humanities. Human beings and the more than human world come out of that future.

    MH:

    Your prompt suggests to me that you think that the future of Modern Greek Studies will inevitably be ecological – that the humanities already are and will have to be ‘more-than-humanities’. Is that accurate?

    NZ:

    My main question here is if Modern Greek Studies could take up the concepts of nature, human being, ecological citizenship to shape new perspectives on our reading practices in literature, arts, modern philosophy and so on.

    If one inquires in Modern Greek literature departments about the current state of ecocriticism in the country, the answer tends to be that certainly not much as be going on in rather ‘unusual’ or ‘exotic’ field. However, on closer examination it becomes obvious that environmental approaches to literature and culture are actually popular in Greece, but in contrast to other European countries, the amount of work done in the field of Environmental Humanities has not increased in recent years.

    MH:

    I see – so you understand your research as introducing an ecological lens to a Greek critical context?

    NZ:

    Yes, or perhaps several lenses: my PhD thesis in progress brings together three main disciplines such as Ecocriticism, Ecopsychology, and Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty under the term of Ecophenomenology in American and Modern Greek Poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.

    I’m grateful, in this, for the support, strong willingness, efforts and encouragement shown to me by my Professors Mr. Dimitris Angelatos and Ms. Peggy Karpouzou who are literary scholars and theorists of literature and culture, and have been avid readers of the eco-lensing in my research.

    MH:

    You mention ‘lenses’ in your response – how, or to what, will you be applying these critical, psychological, and phenomenological filters?

    NZ:

    My comparative study case brings together these three epistemological terrains by studying nature and body in Walt Whitman and Angelos Sikelianos’ poetic works. The translation of ‘universal flesh’s’ rhetorics, expressed by Merleau-Ponty, in the ecopoetics and zoopoetics of both poets, is a central means of understanding natural and human world-being, and transcends any dualistic boundaries between body and ‘nature’. The in-habitation of ‘universal flesh’ is held through the embodied and lived experience which shapes an eco-identity of both poets. This kind of identity is perceived in terms of an ecological citizenship that resists the irrationality and logocentrism of poets’ era.

    MH:

    And does this project have specific resonance or importance for a potential Greek ecocriticism (or even – sorry – Grecocriticism)?

    NZ:

    The notion of oikos (home), polis (city) and citizenship have roots in Ancient Greek Antiquity. Specifically, in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Culture the citizens were liberal beings and closely connected to nature and natural daily practices, found in religion, medicine, cuisine etc. Nature was an anthropomorphized being and adored as goodness, the Mother of all Beings. The citizens were active beings in all spheres of life and this action could be considered as a primary form of ecological awareness. Protection of and respect for nature was one of the major aspects of their biocosmic perception. This perception is found in literature and culture right up to the late 20th century, where pastoral poetry, nature writings, lyric poetry, movements of Romanticism, Symbolism etc. are full of nature and body, and the symbiosis of nature and humans, expressed in varying ways.

    My research aims to revive an eco-sense and raise the possibility of discussing an ‘eco-turn’ in the Modern Greek Studies. Two central questions, therefore, one global, one local:

    How can we live in balance with all of life on Earth?

    How about the Greek eco-humanist perspective?

    MH:

    I see – so it’s a question of global concerns thought through and into a local frame, shaped by Greek cultural and intellectual histories (particularly concerning citizenship)?

    NZ:

    Yes: the Modern Greek Studies requires a reimagining of who we were and are, and the story that we live by. Through my ecophenomenological perspective we could observe the constant interplays of the global phenomena which are in progress and try to understand their complex mechanics. New reading practices of Modern Greek Literature will not only offer an interpretation of nature and body as representations, ideas, expressions etc. in the texts, but they will shape our ethos and offer a new model of thinking in praxis: the extension and expansion of a new kind of eco-cosmopolitanism, a universal perspective of partial subjectivities in space that lead to the shaping of an identity of eco-citizen.

    Here emphasis will be given to the meanings of cosmos and universal being which are ascribed to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘flesh of the world’. The latter is considered to be the classical beauty of Wholeness, and it based on the constant chiasms of nature and body in time and space. This symbiosis is the unfolding of an eco-identity which describes the ‘birth’ of a new planetary perception of human action: an eco–flâneur, like us, but found throughout history. This kind of action could be the Greek eco-humanist perspective of a globalized and cosmopolitan being in both theory and praxis.

  • The Economy of Francesco: How to Repair the ‘Common Home’

    The Economy of Francesco: How to Repair the ‘Common Home’

    Francesco, va’ e ripara la mia casa;
    Now go, Francesco, and repair my house
    (From The Major Legend, St. Bonaventure, XIII century)

    Image by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

    Conference Review

    For those who still consider him as the saint who talked to animals, or, as historian Lynn White Jr. suggests, “the patron saint of ecologists” (14), it may be surprising to learn that in 2020, Francis of Assisi is primarily being regarded as a lens for conducting a critical observation on the present-day world, and as a model for repairing some critical issues affecting our time. These aspects have emerged clearly from The Economy of Francesco, the international conference convened by Pope Francis, which took place from 19 to 21 November 2020. While it was originally – and symbolically – scheduled in Assisi, Italy, the city of il Poverello, the conference later became digital due to the pandemic. However, just like many other events during these past few months, this choice revealed a silver lining regarding the fact that it allowed for a more successful alignment with the spirit of (global) connectedness for which it aimed. Hearing the different accents in English during several transcultural discussions among international participants reminded us how English could eventually become a real lingua franca, both inclusive and depoliticized, which will be able to bring together worlds often perceived as being apart. 

    The Economy of Francesco saw the presence of some distinguished intellectuals from around the world, and its main purpose was to discuss and adjust the current dominant economic model(s) in order to imagine more ethical, sustainable, and inclusive versions of them. Keynote speakers including the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus, as well as Jeffrey Sachs and Vandana Shiva, among many others, joined a team of more than 2000 under-35 researchers, economists, and change-makers from 115 different nations who responded to the Pope’s call to reflect critically on the status of our current global economy – and to develop alternatives to it. On a planet in which 1% of the population possesses more wealth than the remaining 99% (Oxfam.org), it is evident how a re-conversion of the system, its connected thoughts, and its values can no longer be overlooked.

    By establishing the life of a thirteenth-century man as a cornerstone for developing a critique of advanced capitalism, Pope Francis proposes a possible response – and a useful narrative – for re-evaluating the logic of individual profit, whose inequalities and injustices have now become unequivocally clear, both among humans and in relation to the nonhuman world. Through his Encyclical Letter, titled Laudato Si’ (2015), Pope Francis introduced Catholic discourse into the wider, international debate that has been addressing the urgency of the current ecological crisis. By “supplementing Catholic dogma on Natural Law, with Naomi Klein’s analysis of the destructive role of Capitalism” (Braidotti 66), Bergoglio traced the direction towards an ‘ecological conversion’ that “calls for a number of attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness” (Vatican.va). His work does not appear as a mere greenwashing strategy that winks at the growing environmental movements that have appeared worldwide. Rather, the Pope joined the chorus of contemporary critics who are endorsing a reflection on the very meaning(s) of the notion of ‘human’ while highlighting its inextricable entanglement with other forms of life. The image of the ‘common home’ discussed in his Encyclical – which refers to the very household evoked by the Greek word oikos – has become a powerful eco-logical trope, and it has paved the way for the core eco-nomically oriented discussion that occurred at the conference.

    Among the most interesting aspects characterizing the event, the adoption of an affirmative rhetoric remains pivotal: The Economy of Francesco, in fact, did not represent just another apocalyptic account of the future of planet Earth, with which the notion of the Anthropocene often pairs. Rather, the conference revealed a keen proactive standpoint that allows problems to be re(con)figured into challenges, for which one can – and should – find a solution. Similarly, attention was placed on the idea that – albeit being characterized by major inequalities and discriminations – the current dominant economic model can still represent a useful baseline for developing new solutions. Along these lines, Pope Francis appointed the younger generation as the primary addressee of this effort: this choice suggests how hopes are pinned on generational change, which is capable of pouring new creative energy into the effort of providing (possible) responses to the many crises – from climate change to the global pandemic – that the world is undergoing.

    It is not possible to summarize the many insights that emerged during the conference in just a few words. In fact, they did not come only from the well-known speakers mentioned above, but also from the many participants attending the event, the working groups, and other workshops organized during the months before the conference, among which a real international debate flourished. Sustainability, accountability, fraternity, and inclusivity remain part of a long list of keywords that resounded during the three days of intensive, stimulating discussions that comprised the event. Yet I would like to avoid proposing another soporific rhyme of ‘big words’, which often runs the risk of emptying valuable concepts of their deepest sense. In its place, I propose one word – a verb, specifically – which, better than many others, epitomizes Saint Francis’s life, and which may also become useful for inspiring the widely discussed changes in current economic discourse(s) along more ethical assumptions: the verb is to repair.

    This term connects to a mystical experience, which, while not necessarily in a strict sense, but, rather, in a more intimate one, was fundamental in the process of young Francis’s conversion. While in contemplation in the tiny church of San Damiano, a crumbling building next to a leprosarium that had been disregarded by the local population, the saint suddenly heard the crucifix providing him with a demand: Francesco, va’ e ripara la mia casa; “Now go, Francesco, and repair my house” (Caroli 609). The rest is history, in a literal sense. The effects of this command are still visible after eight centuries in the livelihood of the Franciscan movement that brings together hundreds of people and many spiritual and material experiences.

    ‘To repair’, rather than building up something new from scratch – resonates with the idea of amending something already existing for responding to new necessities. The fact of reinventing an entire economic system, which is often invoked as the only possible, utopic solution, appears as a challenge too demanding to even be properly conceived – let alone achieved – within the limits of humans’ capacities. The idea of ‘repairing’ our economy, instead, scales down this challenge by inspiring everyone, everywhere, to get involved in creating a much-invoked change and within the limits of one’s own experimentality and network. Just like Francis did.

    The time for awaiting (a) new economic model(s) to be lowered ‘from above’ is over. The momentum, Francis seems to suggest, must come from below, and, right now, through a shared eco-logical perspective on the world that can inspire the development of a new eco-nomic process, that is, how its resources should be managed. Words like ‘entrepreneur’, ‘finance’ and ‘investment’ will not disappear in the dictionary of the new economy; rather, attention will be dedicated to how new meanings will have to be assumed by repairing old understandings along more pluralistic and inclusive postulations, according to profits that cannot be singular (i.e. individual), but that apply to all those inhabiting the common house: the entire human-nonhuman community of planet Earth.

    Bibliography

    Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity, 2019.
    Caroli, Ernesto (Editor). Fonti Francescane. Padova Editrici Francescane, 2011.
    White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, pp. 3-14, 1996. [1967].

    Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, Italy, in cotutelle with Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where he is a member of the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”, and an affiliate member of the European doctoral program PhdNet. He is also a member of the Research Group “Oikos. Ecology and the Study of Culture” at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen. His research interests focus on Ecocriticism, Posthuman Studies, English Modernism, Virginia Woolf, and pastoral poetry. His dissertation project proposes an ecocritical reading of English Georgian pastoral poetry (1911-1926) for a critical reevaluation of this trend.

  • Dreaming of Home

    Dreaming of Home

    © Micaela Amateu Amato

    Review of Cara Judea Alhadeff’s Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle: A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Elfrig Publishing, 2017; www.zazudreams.com)

    ‘There is something peculiar about this book: the fact is the cover gives it away right from the start’. That was the first line of Walter Benjamin’s review of The Fairy Tale and the Present written by Alois Jalkotzy in 1930. Benjamin excoriated that author for diluting the fairy tale — once replete with evil step-mothers, murderers and drunks — into a saleable commodity made of bland pieties suited for ‘children’.

    No such charge can be made against Zazu Dreams. Its cover pulls no punches. In the foreground, a young man, Zazu, holds his malamute husky, Cocomiso, both atop their friend, a humpback whale. In the background, a tableau of the contemporary grotesque. On the left, sewers vomit effluent into the sea. On the right, chimneys belch noxious fumes into the night air. Between these man-made geysers, a red moon hangs: low, fat, ominous. Zazu Dreams is not for the helicoptered and the coddled, those sensitive to microaggressions and in need of trigger warnings. Zazu Dreams is an unvarnished fairy tale in which the comforting is enfolded within the scary and the beautiful is braided into the ugly. Zazu dreams in images, in words, in philosophical musings, and in historical forays. Zazu dreams to awaken us from our slumbers.

    Boy, dog, and whale traverse oceans, crisscross centuries, now fly towards the sky, now dive into the ocean deep. They travel to the ends of the earth, searching and searching, without rest. What is it young Zazu searches for? He searches for home, for being-in-place. Zazu seeks to be one among other beings, whether these be trees, animals, waters or skies. But wherever he goes all Zazu finds is the overweening presence of the human. Of human things that engorge on the suffocation, mutilation and destruction of all other beings, including other humans. Zaza searches for home because he has been made homeless. But why the restlessness? Zazu is restless because he can find no place to rest, because the earthbound — the terrestrial — has been exiled from the earth.

    Today, the prime mover of this displacement is the corporation. Corporations have exiled the terrestrial and now squat over the whole earth. Despite its name which invokes the dense materiality of flesh and earth — corpus, corporeal, corpse — the corporation is, in fact, an extraterrestrial. Once a legal fiction invented by some humans, it now rules over human and other beings as an a-mortal Demon-God. The expanding universe of corporate fictions already owns the earth, the seas, and the skies. Even the wind and the sun now fall within the grasp of private and state corporations. And all that the corporation touches it remakes in its own image. Land, and water and air, birds and fish and fowl, all these and more have been fictionalized into resources. Nothing seems able to escape the insatiable vortex of this fictional pair, ‘corporation/resource’. As Zazu discovers, even primordial sustenance —mother’s milk— has been mined for its ingredients to be packaged for profit.

    A-mortal corporations are a phantasm just as fairy tales are a fantasy. The corporation cannot be held guilty any more than a fairy tale can be put in the dock. Rewriting fantasies will not make them less fantastic. A tasteless story is best just not told. Corporate minions cannot be punished any more than robots can be jailed. Both are critters who willingly enact what others have willed, who only do their jobs! Reprogramming machines will not alter their inability to disobey. A mindless robot is best turned off. But everywhere Zazu goes and everywhere Zazu looks, all he can see is the detritus of corporations and their efficient executors. The rule of the corporate form seems unassailable, its power absolute, its malefic consequences unavoidable. Are we therefore condemned to serve the monsters we created?

    Fruits take their time to ripen. I had to wait a year to write this appreciation. I wanted to find out what happened to the Jewish community whom Zazu discovered there during his travels. My parents once lived in famed neighborhood of Jew-Town, Fort Cochin, Kerala. They knew of the Koders — Sattu, brother Elias, sister Lily — the preeminent family among the ‘white’ Jews of Cochin. Until the mid-1980s, there were enough members to constitute the minimum ten persons needed for synagogue services. In 1987, an unbroken four hundred and nineteen years of Shabbat minyan came to an end for the lack of quorum. Now there are said to be but five Jewish persons left in Jew-Town. Rumor has some three or four ‘black’ Jewish families living on the mainland, though not much more is known of them. Such are the tatters left of the once vibrant fabric of Kerala Jewry.[1] Such withered remains of community are witness to our contemporary condition. Must we therefore resign ourselves to cynicism and despair?

    Zazu grows up among people who speak Ladino, a linguistic mosaic that began as the Spanish spoken by Jews in medieval Spain. Enriched by exilic wanderings since 1492, Ladino absorbed elements from – among others – Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and French. Its continued if fragile existence gives voice to the power of enfleshed words, of embodied speech, of the irrepressible murmur of voices that always threaten the rule of grammarians. Zazu’s vernacular signposts the fate of those unhoused, uprooted, cast adrift. For is it not speech that forms the babbling brook from which an ‘I’ separates itself from a ‘we’ — a ‘we’ that is stutteringly convoked prior to the collectives of family, tribe, society, nation, and even species? The variety of voices may well be countless — the scream of monkeys tortured to test shampoo, the moans of a grieving father, the mating songs of humpback whales, the laughter of a child at play. And yet, perhaps, it is precisely in this tyrannical anarchy of voices that the restless might find home.[2] The word is tyrannical because it cannot be escaped. The word is anarchic because it has no author. Perhaps the anarchic tyranny of speech does bind those who have little in common, as it does for Zazu and his friends. Perhaps Zazu’s dream for us is also to seek home in vernacular activities — vernaculars that endlessly express the endlessly inventive capacity of humans, to be.

    Zazu Dreams in the teeth of despair, searching for redemption in shit. That he still dreams is a sign of hope emergent, of the green shoots of spring. By dreaming with Zazu one may learn how to live in the ruins, amid the irreparable, among the fallen.

    [1] Nathan Katz and Ellen Goldberg carefully document the history and fortunes of the Cochin Jews in The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India (University of South Carolina Press, 1993). Shalva Weil offers a thorough if brief survey of “Jews in India” in the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora, v.3, ed: M. Avrum Ehrlich (ABC-CLIO, LLC 2008, pp.1204-1212). For a tender and bracing personal account of home-lessness read Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers, by Ruby Daniel and Barbara Johnson (The Jewish Publication Society, 1995).

    [2] Resounding through Alhadeff’s ‘search for home through language’ is George Steiner’s ‘Our Homeland, the Text’, reprinted in his collection on reading and writing, No Passion Spent (Yale University Press, 1995).

    Sajay Samuel teaches at The Pennsylvania State University.

  • Birches like Barcodes

    Birches like Barcodes

    Art by Nick Hayes / Poem by Robert Macfarlane

    Writing Nature in the Anthropocene: Responses to Robert Macfarlane’s Masterclass, in Conversation with Joanna Dobson (Creative Writing Masterclass Series at Sheffield Hallam University, 18 November 2020)

    Response by Katharina Maria Kalinowski

    How do “we” respond to the many Anthropocenes in times of accelerated ecological crisis? Is it possible to write the legible strata of the earth? Do we need new forms of writing to register invisible and incomprehensible layers of a world that exceeds the limits of our understanding (hasn’t it always)? At the borders of language, how can writing and activism intersect? Are “we”, humankind, “good ancestors” for generations to come?

    Given the current state of the ecosphere, I’d be inclined to answer the last question with “no”. However, viewing humankind from a species point of view is problematic if we consider how explosive disparities shape the living conditions of the current generation on a daily basis. Following the argument that climate change is not so much anthropogenic as “sociogenic”,[1] the question concerning our heritage pushes against a homogenous humankind and opens up to a microcosm of stories with more-than-humankind/ness.

    The entanglement of these stories in a larger system is encapsulated in the last line of Macfarlane’s intricate poem “Heartwood”: “Have you heartwood, cutter? / Have those who sent you?” Dedicated to trees facing “unjust felling”, the poem, part charm, part song, part wood, can be seen as a piece of lyrical activism that enchants without euphemising and interrogates without scapegoating.

    One of the dangers of the (geochronologic) Anthropocene is its tendency to naturalise violent social and economic divisions and present the state of the world as inevitable. Here’s where writing can complicate, diversify, and wager on alternative scenarios; here’s where poetry can make something happen: what stuck with me most is Macfarlane’s cautious, yet unfalteringly urgent belief in the spell-binding potential of writing to re-invent form and to observe, to question, to touch, to affect, to change. Investigating what may be framed as the “golden spike” of the Environmental Humanities, namely the ever-present question whether poetry, or literature in general, can “save the earth”,[2] he offered an insightful response, unsurprisingly starting with “no” (again).

    For Macfarlane, the “golden spike”-question needs revising; it should really be asking: can literature join forces with other movements and creative arts to contribute to political changes? The answer to this is, finally: yes, of course! Macfarlane’s “Heartwood”, which became part of the Sheffield tree felling protests, is only one of many examples of how writing can challenge the status quo and create a shared space to imagine other voices and other worlds. Generating sets of new, unexpected relations, his texts make me wonder about the connection between (natural?) birches and (artificial?) bar codes, and how we poetically embody nature as more than a consumable good changing ownership through a red-light beep.

    In this sense, Macfarlane’s suggestion to “wearily embrace” anthropomorphic modes reminds me of Jane Bennett’s notion of vital materialism, in which “a touch of anthropomorphism” can “catalyse a sensibility” to a re-enchanted world filled with variously composed animate materialities vibrantly alive.[3] It further prompts critical reflection on anthropocentric assumptions determining what counts as human – and therefore as anthropomorphic – in the first place: it is arguably easier to categorise something as human-like than to categorise the human as something-like, as one among many unique beings that share their vulnerable lives in the Anthropocene.

    Literature cannot afford to choose the easier way. Embedded in a socio-cultural, political continuum, writing is one among many active and expressive forms that can make the world not only more comprehensible but also more liveable. It is neither separate from other forms of activism, nor does it exclude them – literature is shaped by its ability to both amplify and make silence for other voices. Nothing sums this up better than the following comment posted in the Zoom chat, one of many words that stayed with me long after clicking on “leave meeting”:

    Sometimes you have to tie yourself in knots about anthropomorphism and sometimes you have to spend your weekend dressed as a frog at the nature reserve open day to engage people and there’s space for both I think!

    By Rachel Dowse, sent in the Zoom chat

    [1] Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative”, The Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 62-69 (66).

    [2] The phrase is borrowed from John Felstiner’s book Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, Yale UP, 2010. Question to the reader: What would poetry have to be exchanged with in this phrase to prompt a “yes” response?

    [3] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke UP, 2010, p. 99.

    Response by Melina Lieb

    I no longer remember why, but I had felt a bit down on the day of the masterclass, and logged into Zoom hoping it would cheer me up. Instead, it left me even more pensive, though in a strangely reassuring way. I know that the world is in a precarious state, but often I don’t know how to cope with the anxiety caused by this knowledge. I suppose others feel the same, but I usually cannot hear them in the echo chamber of my own head. Talking or listening to people talk about the subject helps a lot. It might not immediately solve problems, but hearing your own thoughts and feelings reflected by others makes them more endurable. You are not alone. And as the saying goes: Every dripping wears the stone.[1]

    Macfarlane found very fitting words for the feeling I’ve described: “The world has begun to make nonsense of realism”. The times we’re living in just are eerie and gothic. And this distortion is being recognised by literature. In Underland, Macfarlane pursues the question: “Are we being good ancestors?”. As Katharina highlights above, the answer too often is “no”. Driving through birch forests like barcodes, Macfarlane arrives at the only place where he would say that people have done a good – or at least, the best possible – job of being good ancestors. This place is Onkalo, the world’s first permanent repository for nuclear waste, on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto.[2] On hearing the name, I remembered watching a film about this place, years ago. It was called Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. I remember a match being lit in a dark cave, illuminating a man with a yellow helmet, talking in a solemn voice. I don’t remember his exact words, but he might have said what is stated on one of the movie posters: “We need you to know that this place should not be disturbed. You should stay away from this place. Then you will be safe”.

    When the people who built and filled the storage are no longer there, the place will speak for itself. Will it seem as eerie to our descendants as it already seems to me now?

    Speaking about speaking places, Macfarlane describes another potentially eerie site, though despite its “chilling” atmosphere, it has a fascinating charm to him. Orford Ness, a shingle spit on England’s Suffolk coast was a nuclear testing site but has now been given back to the wild and is protected by the National Trust. Inspired by this landscape, Macfarlane published Ness, his attempt at a different version of a medieval play on nature lashing back against the military-industrial complex. “Superheroes” of different genders, composed partly of organic matter, partly of the detritus of capitalism and consumerism – “speaking in swifts”, with “bones of plastic” – rush to the peninsula. Macfarlane recites, ending each verse with a warning: “Look, here he comes. – Look, here she comes. – Look, here they come. – Look, here as comes”.

    The power of these words still remains with me. It is one of Macfarlane’s great strengths to send powerful words out into the world, spells, songs, charms, chants. They are simultaneously an ushering and inspiration, intended to be spoken and extended by as many voices as possible – especially young voices, children and teenagers, our descendants. May they find a new way of speaking, of getting over the eeriness of our times, together.

    [1] This is a translation of the common German idiom “Jeder Tropfen höhlt den Stein.” A more common phrasing in English might be “Constant dripping wears the stone.” In this case, though, I wanted to place the emphasis on “every” drop.

    [2] See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/what-lies-beneath/537894/

    Authors:

    Katharina Maria Kalinowski is a bilingual poet and EUmanities fellow at the Universities of Cologne and Kent. Her creative-critical PhD project focuses on ecopoetics, the Anthropocene, and expanded forms of translation. Her publications include Magma, Epizootics, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

    Melina Lieb is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim, Germany. Her research focus is on 21st-century British Nature Writing, ecocriticism and ecopoetry. In her dissertation she considers the role of the “common” in this field of literature, including aspects such as the everyday, the ordinary and the familiar as well as the shared and the political. Melina also writes her own prose and poetry inspired by the natural world, both in English and German.

  • Summary of the 15th EASLCE Webinar: Brexit Ecocriticism

    Summary of the 15th EASLCE Webinar: Brexit Ecocriticism

    Host:
    Dr Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia at Okanagan, Canada

    Participants:
    Nikoleta Zampaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (co-coordinator)
Julia Ditter, Northumbria University, United Kingdom (co-coordinator)
    Claudia Miller, University of La Laguna, Spain
    Klara Machata, University of Freiburg, Germany
    Lena Pfeifer, University of Würzburg, Germany

    On 2 May we joined Dr Greg Garrard for a discussion on climate scepticism and his concept of Brexit Ecocriticism. As an introduction, Garrard summarised the key arguments his co-authored collection Climate Change and Scepticism for us. The new approach to ecocriticism Garrard suggests is concerned with the cognitive dissonances between accepted views about environmental attitudes. If we come to see cultural and political polarisation as the central problem in Western society, Garrard argues, the most important task is to challenge our stereotyping of those we disagree with. Such an intentional shift in perspective, he suggests, will open up a forum for respectful debate that has been closed down by polarising echo chambers, filter bubbles, and partial news outlets. As difficult as this may be when we find that we encounter perspectives that we perceive as irreconcilable with our own worldviews, it is necessary to try and see the world from the perspective of oppositional political cultures and identities to counter-act those currents of polarisation that threaten to tear our societies apart by hindering respectful debate across the divides.

    After engaging the reading, Garrard invited us to think about the implications of these ideas on our own cultures and those that we study in our projects. The topics discussed included:

    • The connection between resurgent nationalisms and landscape imaginaries, including the specific situation in Germany and Greece
    • The importance of interdisciplinary research for ecocritics
    • The different values that cultures attribute to the environment and how these can be understood through national cultural and natural histories
    • Pedagogical strategies and rhetoric positions for engaging with climate sceptics empathetically, and how to make sure that our debates can engender political action
    • The heterogeneity of ecocritical research
    • Ethnocentric readings of the environment, and the predominance of Anglo- and Eurocentric discourses
    • The role of the literary scholar and public engagement

    Further reading:
    Garrard, Greg. “Introduction.” Climate Change and Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis.” Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/climate-change-scepticism-a-transnational-ecocritical-analysis
    Garrard, Greg. “Brexit Ecocriticism.” Green Letters, forthcoming.