Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Category: Conversations

  • Ecocriticism and Birding

    Ecocriticism and Birding

    Having written a PhD dissertation about human–bird relations in contemporary Scandinavian novels while also being an active birder, I’ve often thought about the links between birding, literary fiction, and ecocriticism. While my dissertation is grounded in literary theory, only drawing on field experience in indirect ways, surely there must be more to be said about writing and birding. As Jemma Deer (2022) points out, birds “have been making music, visual art, and aesthetic judgments for far longer than humans have,” and “provide the blueprint or muse for much human artistic production” (10). One would think that texts about birds, aside from reflecting interest in them, might be influenced by the practice of birding in ways that are evident in form and style.

    Among literary scholars, however, the notion that observing birds and writing about them go together is far from being the rule. On the contrary, until the late twentieth century it was commonplace to read birds in literature solely as symbols or metaphors. While Beryl Rowland (1978) primarily saw birds as Jungian symbols, Atle Kittang (1988) argued that birds in poetry rarely if ever correlate with the models from which they are derived and are not intended to do so either. Then again, as early as 1972, Joseph Meeker (1997) argued that birds can provide a mirror “to help us to understand human relationships” (108) and that “human conversation is not much different from birdsong” (109). Leonard Lutwack, in Birds in Literature (1994), tentatively suggested the possibility of reading birds ecologically, but it was only with the emergence of ecocriticism as a distinct field that reading environmental texts through a framework of “kinship between nonhuman and human” was recognized as a legitimate critical pursuit (Buell 1995, 180).

    The University of Stavanger, where I did my research, is located at the edge of Jæren, a coastal plain in south-western Norway known for its rich birdlife. I would spend the day writing about books about birds and then, on my way home, stop off by one of the nearby lakes to catch up on actual birds, taking notes and photos and often reporting my observations. In late spring, a pair of European oystercatchers would nest on a roof below our third-floor office space, bringing food for their young and driving away intruders, and in winter, hooded crows and jackdaws in their hundreds could be seen flocking to and from their communal nighttime roost. With literary birds in the office and actual birds out the window, I took my cue from what Lawrence Buell, with reference to Barry Lopez, calls “the aspiration to write and think more ecocentrically,” acknowledging that one’s approach to art and scholarship is not exclusively formed through reading but also through embodied experience of specific environments (Buell 2005, 99).

    Strolling or hiking through natural landscapes tends to trigger reflection, which can be conducive to writing, but this is not necessarily true of birding, where one is wholly absorbed in detecting and identifying species or interpreting their behavior and vocalizations. Where some make a case for “slow birding” (e.g. Strassmann 2022), this is a reaction to the realization that birding generally is not a particularly slow practice. Birding engages one’s senses of sight and hearing, as well as memory and intuition, in direct and immediate ways, and even when a birder is stationary, waiting for a skulking bird to show, attention tends to be directed outward, toward the bird, rather than to inner thought processes. To combine birding with writing or literary scholarship can therefore seem like a precarious endeavour. If nothing else, birding is a source of inspiration, and the genre of the trip report is not entirely unrelated to that of nature writing.

    Standing beneath the highway bridge at the mouth of the Hafrsfjord, watching Arctic terns and common terns at their breeding colonies, I had Charlotte McConaghy’s dystopian novel Migrations (2021) fresh in mind. Considering that the narrator of Migrations tries to follow the last Arctic terns on their migration to Antarctica, seeing them as a last remnant of wildness in a world destroyed by humans, I couldn’t help but read the terns as beacons of hope. While a life of birding offers a wealth of peak experiences, it can also lead to a keen awareness of habitat loss and population declines. Arctic terns are not endangered yet, though their populations are decreasing in some places (BirdLife International 2018). In Norway, a more pressing concern is a dramatic regional decline in the population of common terns, which has led to their being categorized as Endangered on the National Red List (Stokke et al. 2021). Regardless of Red List assessments, I counted myself lucky to see the two species breeding side by side, despite overfishing, predation from American mink, and the mounting threat of climate change. While Arctic terns migrate further and see more daylight in the year than any other known species, common terns are not far behind.

    Watching the terns hovering and diving, catching fish and feeding their young, swooping and turning with supreme elegance, I recalled narratologist Marco Caracciolo’s (2020) concept of “kinesthetic empathy,” how empathy does not necessarily have to entail imagining our way into an individual mind but rather into a moving body, or even an assemblage of bodies (239–240). Accounting for “embodied collectivity” demands moving beyond the focus on individual agency that has been the norm in narratology and literary scholarship (241). Observing a murmuration of starlings, a skein of geese, or swallows gathered in their hundreds, our attention is drawn not to the individual, but to the group, of which the individual forms a part.

    Whether one is panning a bird in the viewfinder or taking in the jizz of a bird briefly glimpsed, kinesthetic empathy is integral to birdwatching. With time, one develops a knack for tracing—and anticipating—the movements of birds, effectively predicting where they’ll be from one moment to the next. Embodied skills are arguably also manifest in the process of reading fiction, the ability to trace plot developments and follow them through to their conclusion, while uncovering underlying themes and motifs. Ecocriticism and birding are both comparative practices in which subtle contrasts can be crucial. Beyond that, birding calls for keen eyes and ears, identification skills and field experience, while ecocriticism requires theoretical knowledge and sensitivity to cultural context. Where bird identification is based on diagnostic features, however, literary texts demand hermeneutical forms of interpretation that are rarely conclusive.

    If the relevance of birding to literary fiction can seem obscure, the “naturalist gaze” through which birders perceive the world (Cherry 2019, 9, 41–42) is central to analysis of nature writing. Some ecocritics are bound to disagree, but I would contend that birding can contribute toward sharpening or even reorienting one’s “ecocritical gaze.” Take a classic work of nature writing such as J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), written with such nuance and attention to detail that even those unfamiliar with the species described can appreciate its aesthetic qualities. Where non-birders are enamored by its form and style, its poetic, densely layered language, birders are led to recall the flight patterns of actual species ranging from snipe to kestrel, patterns that are not metaphorical but literal, idiosyncratic to the point of being diagnostic, easy to apprehend but difficult to describe. Rather than making intertextual references, Baker refers to a shared body of field-ornithological knowledge and transposes it into literary form. By presenting recognizable perceptual experiences in striking and unexpected ways, nature writing can challenge and broaden our worldview. Birds can be evocative of places, memories, and impressions, as well as entire narratives. There are countless ways to account for their presence, but no matter how dense a layer of metaphor we cloak them in, the starting point must surely be the birds themselves.

    References

    Baker, J. A. 1967. The Peregrine. New York Review of Books.

    BirdLife International. 2018. Sterna paradisaea. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T22694629A132065195.en. Accessed on 13 March 2024.

    Buell, Lawrence. 1996 (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

    Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

    Caracciolo, Marco. 2020. “Flocking Together: Collective Animal Minds in Contemporary Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 135, no. 2, 239–253. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.2.239

    Cherry, Elizabeth. 2019. For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

    Deer, Jemma. 2022. “Birdwatching and Wordwatching: The Avian Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Danette DiMarco and Timothy Ruppert (eds.), Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination, 9–23. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

    Kittang, Atle. 1988. “Fuglar og poesi.”  In Atle Kittang, Møtestader: Utvalde artiklar om litteratur og litteraturteori, 52–67. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget.

    McConaghy, Charlotte. 2021. Migrations. London: Vintage.

    Meeker, Joseph W. 1997. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. Third edition. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

    Rowland, Beryl. 1978. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

    Stokke, B. G. et al. 2021. “Fugler: Vurdering av makrellterne Sterna hirundo for Norge.” In Norwegian Red List for Species 2021. Trondheim: Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Artsdatabanken). http://www.artsdatabanken.no/lister/rodlisteforarter/2021/31752

    Strassmann, Joan E. 2022. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard. New York: TarcherPerigee.

    About the Author

    Endre Harvold Kvangraven recently defended his PhD dissertation in Nordic Literature at the
    University of Stavanger, Norway, with the title Literary Birding: Human–Bird Relations in
    Contemporary Novels from Norway and Sweden. He is also the author of Ulv i det norske
    kulturlandskapet (Wolves in a Cultural Landscape, Res Publica, 2021), a work of literary
    nonfiction tracing the role of wolves in Norwegian cultural history.

  • 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.