Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Category: Webinar Summaries

For information about future webinars, please see the announcements on the EASCLE website or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

  • Summary of the 18th EASLCE Webinar: Realism(s) in the Anthropocene, Representational and Ethical Challenges

    Summary of the 18th EASLCE Webinar: Realism(s) in the Anthropocene, Representational and Ethical Challenges

    Host: Prof Adeline Johns-Putra, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China & University of Hong Kong

    Participants:
    Lena Pfeifer, University of Würzburg, Germany (co-ordinator)
    Julia Ditter, Northumbria University, UK (co-ordinator)
    Xianmin Shen, Shanghai University, China
    Lucy Oulton, University of Chichester, UK
    Klara Machata, University of Freiburg, Germany
    Hannah Klaubert, Stockholm University, Sweden & GCSC Gießen, Germany
    Kristy Henderson, Rachel Carson Center, Germany
    Isil Sahin Gülter, Firat University, Turkey

    On 16 April, a group of early career scholars interested in the Environmental Humanities joined Prof Adeline Johns-Putra for a discussion about the capacity of literary realism to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. The provided readings offered a multifaceted introduction to the debate of whether realism – as a mode of narrative that has dominated our storytelling, but which is also often anthropocentric – can retain its relevance in the Anthropocene.

    Adeline Johns-Putra offered a summary of the most central tenets of the critical readings. She invited us to think through the dialectic between roman and récit which, according to Fredric Jameson, characterises realist modes of writing, and asked us to consider how new perspectives on history that attend to nonhuman time scales might help us rethink realist conventions.

    Rather than discussing these topics in the abstract, Adeline Johns-Putra offered excerpts of contemporary examples of realist writing and invited us to identify literary strategies that might allow a simultaneously centring and decentring of the Anthropos. The discussion of whether such strategies are effective in highlighting both inter- and intra-species connections at once led us to reflect not only on the ethics of the literary text itself, but also on our own reading practices.

    There were a range of inspiring questions and ideas that we took with us after the webinar and that will help us rethink how we approach realist writing, and literature more broadly, in the future:

    • When the Anthropocene is challenging us in ever new ways, can the emancipatory potential of the novel be harnessed to address these challenges?
    • Do we need a “new” realist novel or has the realist novel always already allowed for multispecies perspectives to shine through, for example in accommodating pockets of descriptions of the environment?
    • Does the anthropocentrism lie on the side of realism, or are we the ones reading realism anthropocentrically?
    • How can literary texts invite multispecies readings while also remaining within the human perspective characterising realism?
    • Should we do away with the human perspective? Why (not)? Why can it be important to recentre the human (as much as we also need to decentre the human)?
    • How can we adopt multiscalar reading practices that change how we read novels and allow us to embrace the ambivalences and tensions that come with a simultaneous decentring and recentring of the human?
  • Summary of the 17th EASLCE Webinar: Transversal Aesthetics

    Summary of the 17th EASLCE Webinar: Transversal Aesthetics

    Host: Dr André Krebber, University of Kassel, Germany

    Participants:
    Julia Ditter, Northumbria University, United Kingdom (co-ordinator)
    Lena Pfeifer, University of Würzburg, Germany (co-ordinator)
    G. J. Hilton, Birmingham University, United Kingdom
    Molina Klingler, University of Würzburg, Germany
    Melina Lieb, University of Mainz, Germany
    Stefano Rozzoni, University of Bergamo, Italy

    On 2 March, a group of aspiring ecocritics joined Dr André Krebber (University of Kassel, Germany) to discuss the interrelation of aesthetics and the non-human. The different readings and cultural productions elicited a lively conversation about the possibilities of aesthetics beyond the human, speciecism, perception, imitation, and other aspects.

    Dr Krebber opened the webinar with an invitation to critically reflect on the two aspects that lie at the very centre of the webinar: aesthetics and transversality. He introduced three different versions of a transversal aesthetics: 1) digitality, 2) multiperspectivity, and 3) modes of knowing and knowledge production. Transversal aesthetics in its relation to the digital poses the question whether the digital has ruled out the human brain in such ways that every form of perception already preconceives the digital and its ways of reading the world. The multiperspectival component at the intersection of aesthetics and the transversal critically asks whether we as humans can ever create our own perspectives or if every perspective only gets multiplied until endless diversification. Finally, Dr Krebber stressed the importance of taking the sensorial aspect inherent in a transversal aesthetics seriously and recognising its contribution to knowledge production.

    In the following, we discussed a selection of different forms of cultural production, among them artistic video installations and nature documentaries. The questions raised by these materials included:

    • Has aesthetics always gone beyond the human or do we need a new form of aesthetics?
    • Is every form of imagining a different species prone to fail as speciecism? What role does imitation play in this context?
    • Can we as humans ever escape the anthropocentrism of our imagination? If not, how do we deal with this?

    It might not come as a big surprise that we did not find conclusive answers to these challenging and mind-bending questions within the 90 minute session. The participants were eager to discuss the material and the questions raised further so that we reconvened for a second session on transversal aesthetics three weeks after the webinar. With a lot of questions to ponder and think about further, we will probably be all ears when we encounter the non-human next time.  

  • Summary of the 16th EASLCE Webinar: Cognition, Emotion, and the Impact of Environmental Narratives

    Summary of the 16th EASLCE Webinar: Cognition, Emotion, and the Impact of Environmental Narratives

    Host: Dr. Alexa Weik von Mossner

    Coordinators: Nikoleta Zampaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) & Julia Ditter, Northumbria University (UK)

    Participants (10 October)

    Roberto Interdonato, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Italy)

    Lenka Filipova, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

    Abdelhabid Jabri, Mohammed 1st University (Morocco)

    Stefano Rozzoni, University of Bergamo (Italy)

    Raffaele Russo, University of Innsbruck (Austria)

    Paula Wieczorek, University of Rzeszów (Poland)

    Participants (5 November 2020)

    Maria Isabel Perez Ramos, University of Oviedo (Spain)

    Jessica Maufort, Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

    Hannah Nelson-Teutsch, University of Würzburg (Germany)

    Leonardo Nolé, City University of New York (USA)

    Melina Lieb, University of Mainz (Germany)

    Timo Maran, University of Tartu (Estonia)

    The topic of this autumn’s webinars has sparked such a huge interest among the scholarly community of EASLCE that our host, Alexa Weik von Mossner, has offered to give her webinar not just once but twice so that all those interested in affective ecocriticism and the new interdisciplinary research field of empirical ecocriticism which Weik von Mossner is crucially involved in developing, could profit from her expertise and gain inspiration for their own work through the discussions. This summary draws on insights and discussions from both webinars.

    The webinar began with an introduction into three of the main concepts around which this webinar was structured: cognitive narratology, (liberated) embodied simulation, and (authorial) strategic empathy. Weik von Mossner explained to us the interdisciplinary challenges of opportunities of econarratology, a cognitive ecocritical approach to narrative emotion, and the important role of cognition in simulating social experience and moral understanding. Moving on to Vittorio Gallese’s theoretisation of the embodied mechanisms which simulate actions, emotions and corporeal sensations, we gained further insights into how we understand other human ad nonhuman beings through our own bodies. Following these more scientific understandings, we were introduced to Suzanne Keen’s theory of ‘strategic empathy’ which describes how authors deliberately employ empathy in their fictional texts for political purposes.

    Drawing on Keen’s scepticism towards the empathy-altruism hypothesis which states that certain kinds of literature make us better persons who behave more ethically (supported by critics like Martha Nussbaum and commonly assumed by many ecocritical and cultural studies scholars), Weik von Mossner pointed out the lack of empirical research that would support such statements. Rather than relying on common assumptions, Weik von Mossner suggests, it would be more productive if we open our research up to interdisciplinary methods and set out to test our assumptions through qualitative and quantitative studies to gather evidence on the actual impact environmental narratives have on ethical behaviour, empathy, and altruism.

    Weik von Mossner then provided us with an overview over key studies in empirical ecocriticism, including a study about the impact of Alice Walker’s “Am I Blue” (1988) and various manipulations of the original on fostering trans-species empathy.

    The presentation was followed by a wide-ranging and enthusiastic discussion which included the following themes:

    • the challenges and opportunities of empirical research for ecocritical scholars
    • the effectiveness of didactic & ‘preachy’ literature and the instrumentalisation of literature for activist purposes
    • the need for empirical evidence to confirm our assumptions about the role of literature in changing attitudes for more environmental justice, and the effectiveness of various narrative strategies in achieving this
    • the narrative strategies of a variety of texts and genres, including nature writing, clifi, essays and popular literature – can texts that rely on simple formulas and a clear message in some cases be more successful in changing readers’ attitudes than more complex texts?

    Further Reading

    Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. “Introduction: Environmental Narrative, Embodiment and Emotion.” In Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

    Keen, Suzanne. 2010. “Narrative Empathy.” In Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, edited by Frederick Louis Aldama, 61-94. Austin: University of Texas Press.Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and W.P. Małecki. 2020. “Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Texts and Empirical Methods.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27 (2): 327-36.

    Małecki, WP, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Małgorzata Dobrowolska. 2020. “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27 (2): 365-84.

    Walker, Alice. 1988. “Am I Blue?” https://genius.com/Alice-walker-am-i-blue-annotated

    Announcements of our next webinars will be published on the EASLCE Website and their Twitter account. Please also consider following us on @ArcadianaE so that you don’t miss our announcements of the webinars or any other events we are organising.

  • 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.