Material Ecocriticism

Description

Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

Foreword: Storied Matter
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Introduction: Stories Come to Matter
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann

Part I. Material Ecocriticism: Theories and Relations
1. From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency Serpil Oppermann

2. On the Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Hannes Bergthaller

3. Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity
Hubert Zapf

4. Natural Play, Natural Metaphor and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism
Wendy Wheeler

5. The Ecology of Color: Goethe's Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism Heather Sullivan

Part II. Narratives of Matter
6. Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity
Serenella Iovino
7. When It Rains
Lowell Duckert

8. Painful Material Realities, Avoidance, Ecophobia
Simon C. Estok
9. Semiotization of Matter: A Hybrid Zone between Biosemiotics and Material Ecocriticism
Timo Maran

Part III. Politics of Matter
10. Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees
Catriona Sandilands

11. Excremental Ecocriticism and the Global Sanitation Crisis Dana Phillips

12. Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea
Stacy Alaimo
13. Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure
Eli Clare

Part IV. Poetics of Matter
14. Corporeal Fieldwork and Risky Art: Peter Goin and the Making of Nuclear Landscapes
Cheryll Glotfelty

15. Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman
Jane Bennett

16. Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia, and an Ecology of Selves
Joni Adamson

17. The Liminal Space between Things: Epiphany and the Physical
Timothy Morton

Coda: Open Closure
A Diptych on Material Spirituality
18. Spirits that Matter: Pathways towards a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality
Kate Rigby
19. Mindful New Materialisms: Buddhist Roots for Material Ecocriticism's Flourishing
Greta Gaard

Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath
David Abram

Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• PHILOSOPHY
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014009
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM
MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM
Edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone [phone] Fax [phone]
2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Material Ecocriticism / edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01395-8 (hardback) - ISBN 978-0-253-01398-9 (pb) - ISBN 978-0-253-01400-9 (eb) 1. Ecocriticism. 2. Materialism. 3. Ecology in literature. I. Iovino, Serenella, [date-] editor. II. Oppermann, Serpil, editor.
PN98.E36M38 2014
809 .9336-dc23
2014007338
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
to those who matter
Contents
Foreword: Storied Matter \ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Stories Come to Matter \ Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
Part 1. Theories and Relations
1 From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency \ Serpil Oppermann
2 Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective \ Hannes Bergthaller
3 Creative Matter and Creative Mind: Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity \ Hubert Zapf
4 Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism \ Wendy Wheeler
5 The Ecology of Colors: Goethe s Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism \ Heather I. Sullivan
Part 2. Narratives of Matter
6 Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity \ Serenella Iovino
7 When It Rains \ Lowell Duckert
8 Painful Material Realities, Tragedy, Ecophobia \ Simon C. Estok
9 Semiotization of Matter: A Hybrid Zone between Biosemiotics and Material Ecocriticism \ Timo Maran
Part 3. Politics of Matter
10 Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees \ Catriona Sandilands
11 Excremental Ecocriticism and the Global Sanitation Crisis \ Dana Phillips
12 Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea \ Stacy Alaimo
13 Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure \ Eli Clare
Part 4. Poetics of Matter
14 Corporeal Fieldwork and Risky Art: Peter Goin and the Making of Nuclear Landscapes \ Cheryll Glotfelty
15 Of Material Sympathies, Paracelsus, and Whitman \ Jane Bennett
16 Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia , and an Ecology of Selves \ Joni Adamson
17 The Liminal Space between Things: Epiphany and the Physical \ Timothy Morton
Coda. Open Closure A Diptych on Material Spirituality
18 Spirits That Matter: Pathways toward a Rematerialization of Religion and Spirituality \ Kate Rigby
19 Mindful New Materialisms: Buddhist Roots for Material Ecocriticism s Flourishing \ Greta Gaard
Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath \ David Abram
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
Foreword
Storied Matter
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
A ROCK JUMPS . EVERY hiker has had the experience. The quiet woods or sweep of desert is empty and still when a snake that seemed a twig writhes, a skink that was bark scurries, leaves wriggle with insectile activity. This world coming to animal life reveals the elemental vibrancy already within green pine, arid sand, vagrant mist, and plodding hiker alike. When a toad that seemed a stone leaps into unexpected vivacity, its lively arc hints that rocks and toads share animacy, even if their movements unfold across vastly different temporalities. Just as the flitting hummingbird judges hiker and toad lithic in their stillness, a rock is within its properly geologic duration a wayfarer, a holder of stories of mountains that undulate and continents that journey the sea. The stone-like toad discloses its intimacy to toad-like stone. Both are part of a material world that challenges the organic bias of the adjective alive.
Though slow moving and often disregarded, toads are instructive animals to follow in their irregular lines of travel. Mel Y. Chen begins her recent book Animacies with a story of these tailless amphibians. Her book examines how sorting the environment into anthropocentric hierarchies of life ignores the hybridity, slipperiness, and vitality of the nonhuman. The tangible childhood presence of toads, writes Chen, spurred her thinking and feeling:
I begin with heartfelt thanks to the toads: literally grubby and ponderous yet lightning fast. . . . Toads infused my lifelong experience with their peculiar, but resolute, grace, with a style of creatureliness that I could and could not occupy. And though they were only sporadically visible, I could be certain a toad was somewhere nearby. (vii)
Frogs and toads are now vanishing from the world, victims of a lethal fungus distributed globally through the laboratory use, commercial trade, and domestic keeping of aquatic frogs. Though the toads of Chen s Illinois youth are important, it is the style of their disappearance that becomes the spur to the subject of the book, with its emphasis upon toxicity, unexpected animacy, and retrospective temporalities and affects (vii). The toxic network formed by a fungus, aquatic frogs, laboratories, humans, and systems of global exchange has materialized certain catastrophic effects, but mourning those results will not alter the future for backyard toads. The extinction of these jumping amphibians is not inevitable.
The leap into movement of Chen s story-laden toads resonates with the possibilities within what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann have described as a new material ecocriticism. 1 With passion, beauty, and rigor, Iovino and Oppermann urge the contemplation of
matter s narrative power of creating configurations of meanings and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-emerging interactions. . . . [M]atter itself becomes a text where dynamics of diffuse agency and nonlinear causality are inscribed and produced. ( Material Ecocriticism 79-80)
What has too often been accounted inert materiality becomes in the works gathered beneath this rubric a site of narrativity, a storied matter, a corporeal palimpsest in which stories are inscribed (Iovino, Stories 451). The world burgeons with unexpected life and astonishing textualities. Material ecocriticism is a story-laden mode of reenchantment. 2 It demands an ethics of relation, entanglement, and wonder. As the essays in this collection make clear, matter and its dynamic, diffusive meshworks generate strange stories and demand participations that move beyond the certainties of closure: not a study of so much as movement with .
A fungus threatening amphibian extinction is one of very many ecological calamities we now face. It is by no means the worst. Yet if we convince ourselves of inhabiting a historical cul-de-sac, then we should also recognize that resignation to calamity is far less demanding than an embrace of the ethics of relationality that bind us to living creatures like toads and fungi as well as to inorganic compounds and the rest of the material world. Despair is easy. Composing with hope requires work. We live in catastrophe s wide wake, but that does not mean that we will not sometimes be surprised when an immobile stone darts to sudden life. Other than a tragically familiar narrative of species decline at anthropogenic environmental change that they bear along with thousands of other plants and animals, what ecomaterial tales might toads offer? Can we imagine these amphibians as possessing a future in which we are perilously coimplicated, companions rather than elegists for the disappeared? 3 Might toads possess a unique materiality, an agency, and even an inscrutability that demand that their story not be merely human, not be familiar, not be a text written without their participation?
A wondrously catalytic toad that brings to life storied matter was discovered in the North of England eight hundred years ago. Encased in the geological, blurring the lines between living and inanimate, beautiful and lethal, nature and culture, the sudden advent of this medieval toad is queer. Writing just before the year 1200, historian William of Newburgh provides the contemporary account. An attractive stone that some unknown artist seems to have fashioned by conjoining two lithic pieces is cracked open to reveal the living creature within. Workers in a quarry are excavating building materials when they discover the perplexing object:
There was found a beautiful double stone, that is, a stone composed of two stones, joined with some very adhesive matter. Being shown by the wondering workmen to the bishop, who was at hand, it was ordered to be split, that its mystery (if any) might be developed. In the cavity, a little animal called a toad, having a small gold chain around its neck, was discovered. When the bystanders were lost in amazement at such an unusual occurrence, the bishop ordered the stone to be closed again, thrown into the quarry, and covered up with rubbish forever. ( The History of English Affairs 28) 4
William narrates the story because its inexplicability haunts him. He does not know what to make of an animal emerging from a rock to announce its strange intimacy to human dwelling (the stones are being quarried to fashion bu