Literature & Environment Research Blog

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Brave New Weird: Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach by Gry Ulstein ABSTRACT: This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new...

The Hunger Games : An Ecocritical Reading by Janice Bland and Anne Strotmann ABSTRACT: This paper examines how a popular series like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy can motivate students to improve their language and literacy proficiency by extensive reading. Moving on from there, we argue a thoughtful and collaborative deep reading of The Hunger Games can broaden as well as change perspectives; for without being openly didactic, the series is sufficiently multilayered to provide meaningful booktalk in the classroom and to trigger engaged debate. Recognising that the degradation of non-human nature through human action has become a major theme in education, we argue that the intentionally interdisciplinary approach of ecocriticism towards a literary text can be a contribution to global issues education in the English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. We offer an ecocritical examination of The Hunger Games, not as an i...

Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice by Serpil Oppermann ABSTRACT: [ Exctract in lieu of an abstract ] In a world much burdened with the wide-spread ecological crisis, the emergence of ecocriticism in the academy had signalled a new and a promising hermeneutical horizon in our interpretations and understanding of the natural world and literature. But since its very beginnings in the 1990s, a basic problem has decidedly threatened the expansion of ecocritical practice on theoretical grounds. It is a crisis closely associated with the ecological crisis itself, namely the crisis of the realist epistemology. Being largely confined to the theoretically discredited parameters of literary realism, ecocriticism today finds itself struggling with hermeneutical closure as well as facing an ambivalent openness in its interpretive approach. This paradox is due to the fact that many prominent ecocritics who aligned themselves with the perspectives of realist epistem...

Dirty Pretty Trash: Confronting Perceptions through the Aesthetics of the Abject by Natasha Seegert ABSTRACT: Both abjection and the return of the abject are crucial feedback. We send away what we don’t want, but the forced confrontation of the abject can have a transformative power when we actually perceive what is a part of us and not apart from us. Visual feedback serves as a potential “event” that can let us experience how our behaviors are problematic; in turn, this knowledge can result in potential for change. When the abject appears in the form of art, it becomes enframed for our scopic pleasure and itself becomes an object to observe and reflect upon: abject as object. When it comes to our encounters with the material world of nature and art, both are more than the picturesque or the sublime, but instead embody the cultural connections that we sometimes wish we could ignore and keep safely out of sight or at a distance. This is why confrontations with the aestheti...

“No Man is an Island”: Tracing Functions of Insular Landscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction by Eva-Maria Schmitz ABSTRACT: Islands are a powerful recurring motif in the writing of David Mitchell. His globe-trotting fictions negotiate the trope of ‘islandness’ as ambiguously positioned between desire and hostility, stranding protagonists on bountiful shores or dooming them in squalid insular exiles. As seemingly contained spaces detached from the centres of the world, islands are malleable platforms for the projection of literary experimentation. In David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Cloud Atlas (2004), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and The Bone Clocks (2014), islands become utopian imaginaries, sanctuaries for the outcast, sources and tools of power and sites of corruption and entrapment, while constantly mediating between reality and the imagination, the past and the future. First and foremost, however, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s ...