ASLE UKI 2015 Conference ‘Green Knowledge’ ABSTRACTS AND SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Plenary Speakers

Louise Westling is Professor Emerita of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She was a founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and its President in 1998. Books include Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (1985), Eudora Welty (1989), The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (1996), and The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (2014). She has also edited two autobiographies and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2014). At present she is co-editing with John Parham A Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment (forthcoming 2016).

Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010). She is editor of the bookseries, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series Literature and Contemporary Thought with Routledge. She is currently finishing a book called Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.

Roger Harrabin is the BBC's Environment Analyst. Roger started his career at the Coventry Evening Telegraph, and as a freelance journalist on Fleet Street before moving to the BBC over 2 decades ago. He has since reported on programmes such as Panorama, Newsnight, Assignment, The Ten O’Clock News, BBC World and The World at One.

Many of today’s environment/equity themes became issues of public concern following Roger’s reports on Radio 4’s “Today” programme. They include climate change, biodiversity, carbon footprints, population, over-fishing, green taxation, road pricing, global inter- connectedness, 3rd World debt, and many more. His interests cover policy on the environment, transport, energy, development, public health and economics, particularly where these areas overlap.

Roger has undertaken many acclaimed interviews on environmental issues with many key figures including Ban Ki Moon, President Barroso, Tony Blair, John Kerry and Al Gore. He is a graduate of St Catharine’s College Cambridge, and has spent academic sabbaticals at Green College Oxford and Wolfson College Cambridge, where he is an Associate Press Fellow. He co-directs the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which brings together senior journalists and outside experts to discuss media coverage of long-term sustainable development issues.

Presentations and Readings

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, was published by Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces. With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press in 2013. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and thirteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention.

Ann has held a senior Fulbright in Fribourg, Switzerland, and the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Uppsala, Sweden. She has served as President of ASLE and has recently been named a Fellow 2015-2018 of the Black Earth Institute, an organization dedicated to the arts, to social and environmental justice, and to matters of the spirit. Her current project is a collaborative poetry/photography manuscript called Mississippi with the acclaimed photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the minor in Environmental Studies. And she teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS.

Marlene Creates joins us to screen her film From the Ground Tier to a Sparrow Batch: a Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow, Blast Hole Pond River, Winter 2012-2013. Her theoretical and studio research interests include photography, ecology, poetry, and place. Since 2002 her principal artistic venture has been to closely observe and work with one particular place — the six acres of boreal forest that she inhabits in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. Her artwork, spanning more than three decades, has been an exploration of the relationship between human experience, memory, language and the land, and the impact they have on each other. Since the 1970s her work has been presented in over 300 solo and group exhibitions across Canada and in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Denmark, the USA, and China. She has also been the curator of several nationally touring exhibitions, worked in artist-run centres, and taught visual arts at the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College, and the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. Her video-poems have been included in national exhibitions and screened at The Voice: VISIBLE VERSE Videopoetry Festival in Vancouver, the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival, and the ViDEOTExT Festival in Bramberg, Austria. In 2001 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Among the awards she has received are the Artist of the Year award from the Newfoundland & Labrador Arts Council (1996), The Long Haul Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts from VANL-CARFAC (2009), the CARFAC National Visual Arts Advocate Award (2009), and a Government of Newfoundland & Labrador Arts and Letters Award for poetry (2010). Recent awards include the 2013 BMW Exhibition Prize at the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival in Toronto, and the Grand Jury Award at the 2014 Yosemite International Film Festival. www.marlenecreates.ca

Panel Abstracts and Speaker Biographies

Panel Session A: Wednesday 2nd September 1.15pm – 2.45pm

A1: Towards an ecological understanding of collaborative practices with and between art and poetry, place and landscape I

If you are that place: poetry, painting and land Harriet Tarlo (Sheffield Hallam University) and Judith Tucker (University of Leeds)

Poet, Harriet Tarlo, and artist, Judith Tucker, have walked and worked together since 2011 on “Tributaries” (W. Yorks) and “Excavations and Estuaries” (the Humber). They continue to talk and make work about these now much-visited places including drawings, paintings and poems conveyed to the public through exhibitions, readings, papers and artists’ books, all of which inter-relate in an open flux. Defying obvious boundaries and binary ways of thinking about art and poetry, this paper will reflect on the ecocritical and ecopoetic possibilities of all these collaborative, cross-disciplinary practices from the original walks and conversations to the production and exhibition of the work. They consider how collaborative practice explores place through writing as painting and painting as writing, considering the processes and materials involved in painting, drawing and writing as well as viewing and reading. In particular, they explore the line, lines being a crucial constituent of mapping, drawing, painting and poetry and key to how we reflect on and in place. Drawing on the new materialist notions of thing-power and of strategic anthropomorphism in relation to avant- garde practices from the mid twentieth century, they consider how and whether inter- disciplinary collaborative practice might be a means to explore more open, environmentally aware engagements with landscape and place, a greater understanding of the “naturalcultural” nexus (Haraway).

Vibrant Spaces: A Thin Place Dialogue Ciara Healy and Mary Modeen

This joint collaborative presentation with accompanying images emerged out of a correspondence between Ciara Healy (University of Reading) and Mary Modeen (University of Dundee). Both as artist/curators and academics, they attend to ecological/environmental ways of knowing: in scientific, cultural, metaphysical, and religious modes. Thin Place was the title of an interdisciplinary curatorial project at Oriel Myrddin, Carmarthen, developed by Ciara in early 2015, which aimed to find connections among making, actions, materials and study. The nature of the curatorial project went beyond the single exhibition in Wales, incorporating a symposium, catalogue and education programme that dissolved boundaries between separate fields of knowledge and, in so doing, attempted to create a metaphysical thin place within the gallery. A written and visual dialogue between the presenters preceded what began as this place-based curatorial project, based on emergent ideas in eco-criticism, eco-feminism, post- and new materialism. Coinciding with this research, Mary led a recent Vibrant Matters conference (Dundee, Jan. 2015), furthering this vital materialist interdisciplinary discourse through the participation of two research networks.

In ancient times it was believed that the delineation between worlds was more permeable in certain anomalous areas in a landscape; thin places were sometimes signified by burial mounds or standing stones. In building upon this notion of a ‘thin place’, this joint presentation poetically addresses ways in which we value our relationship with Place(s), particularly in landscapes where human and non-human relationships were once well established, and where ambiguities in traversing liminal spaces were embraced, anticipating future vibrant ecologies.

Presenter Biographies

Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic. Publications include Poems 1990-2003 (Shearsman 2004), Nab (etruscan 2005), Poems 2004-2014 (Shearsman, forthcoming 2015) and, with Judith Tucker, Sound Unseen (Wild Pansy, 2013) and Behind Land (Wild Pansy, forthcoming 2015). She edited She edited a special feature on “Women and Eco-Poetics” for How2 Vol 3: No 2 as well as The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). Exhibitions of texts in collaboration with artist, Jem Southam and Judith Tucker, have appeared widely, including at The Lowry, Salford, Tullie House, Carlisle; Musee de Moulages, Lyon and The University of Minneapolis. Her academic work appears in critical volumes published by Edinburgh University Press, Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe. Recent critical and creative work appears in Pilot, Jacket, Rampike, English, Classical Receptions and the Journal of Ecocriticism (JoE). She is Course Leader for the long-established M.A. Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

Judith Tucker is an artist who considers place through drawing and painting. She has exhibited extensively both in the UK and abroad. Recent exhibition venues are very wide ranging and include Lyon, France; Brno, Czech Republic; Minneapolis and Virginia, USA. In addition to working in her studio Judith is an academic working at the University of Leeds specialising in practice-led research. She is co-convenor of two place –based networks Land2 and Mapping Spectral Traces. She has recently been invited to be one of the artists in Contemporary British Painting and through this group is involved in exhibitions at Huddersfield, Ipswich and London (forthcoming). Judith Tucker also writes academic essays which can be found in academic journals and in books published by Rodopi, Macmillan , Intellect and Gunter Narrverlag, Tübingen. She is writing a jointly authored chapter with Tarlo for a volume on Extending Ecocriticism eds Welstead and Barry, MUP (forthcoming).

Ciara Healy is a Lecturer and Senior Tutor in Art at University of Reading where she supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students in Studio Practice and Critical Theory. Her teaching is informed by her Doctorate research into Place-based curating, critical writing and Book Arts. She is the 2011 recipient of the WAI & Axis Critical Writing Award, a former Curatorial Fellow of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, and she has published essays in Art Review, This is Tomorrow & Circa. www.ciarahealy.com Mary Modeen is Founder and Course Director for the MFA in Art & Humanities at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland where interdisciplinary investigations between creative praxis and academic study are common to all students. She also supervises PhD candidates who similarly combine areas of art and humanities studies, and she is Co-Director of Research Degrees and PhD Studies for DJCAD. Most often in her research, she combines a creative practice and writing. www.marymodeen.com

A2: Biopolitics, Ancient, Modern and Postmodern

Magic and Science as Power-Thought in Empedocles Richard Hutchins (Princeton)

Bertrand Russell once described scientific thought as, “essentially power-thought—the sort of thought, that is to say, whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor.”1 Taking a cue from Russell, this paper presents what I claim to be the first instance in Greek literature where an author tells us his motive for knowing nature: fragment B111 of the poem On Nature by the 5th century BCE Presocratic poet Empedocles. Traditionally printed as the conclusion to his On Nature, Empedocles B111 promises the poem’s addressee that if he understands Empedocles inquiry into nature, he will have magical powers over wind, rain, drought, agriculture, sickness, and even death.2 To help

1 Russell, Bertrand. The Scientific Outlook. London: Routledge Classics, [1931] 2009, pg. 57. 2 Empedocles B111, my translation from the standard source text, Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker, Hermann Diels & Walther Kranz, reprint 6th edition, Berlin: Weidmann, [1903] 1992, Vol. 1, pg. 353- 4. This standard edition of the text prints Empedocles B111 as the conclusion to his poem On Nature, or Peri\ Fu/sewj: “And all the medicines that there are as a defense against sufferings and old age/you trace this genealogy, I consider a few texts that precede Empedocles: Homer’s Odyssey 10.302-306, the first instance of the word “nature” (ϕυσις) in Greek; and two anecdotes about the Presocratic philosopher Thales of Miletus. While neither expresses a motive for knowing nature, they show that in our earliest Greek texts, knowledge of nature was described as in close association with the instrumentalization and magical control of it. The idea that knowledge of nature is for its own sake is a later Greek idea, and if you believe Russell, has always been the weaker motivation in the history of science. In presenting the knowledge of nature so directly as magical control for human ends, Empedocles deserves a place in the genealogy and critique of the historical frameworks that are the foundations of the present biopolitical, anthropocentric, and toxically magical environmental crisis.

Virgil’s wheel – a rereading of a rhetorical conception on environing Aslaug Nyrnes (Bergen University College)

The close connection between language and landscape is a core perspective in classical rhetoric. In the rhetorical tradition using language is often conceptualized as moving around in a garden or in different landscape formations, where the tasks of speaking, reading and writing are a question of being able to orientate oneself in different kinds of environments. This connection of language and landscape is distinctively formulated in the figure called Virgil’s wheel. The Virgil’s wheel (from John of Garlands Parisiana poetria ca 1240) is a reading of Virgil (70- 19 BC), and has to be understood as part of the history of the reception of Virgil. Virgil’s three poetic texts Bucolica, Georgica and Æneiden are representations on nature canonized as examples of the pastoral, didactic and epic poem traditions, and the wheel is a reading of these texts designed as “a memory grid” of concentric circles, each sector of the circle combining literary style and landscape- and culture formations. “Texts reiterate established protocols of environing, but in doing so they also expose them to our scrutiny and make it possible for us to imagine alternatives”, as it is pinpointed in an article in Environmental Humanities (Bergthaller et al 2014, 272). The aim of this paper is to reread the figure Virgil’s wheel, and discuss it as an early practice of environing. Through the discussion of the ancient figure I will confront contemporary figures of nature representation.

‘I Grew like Corn’: Thoreau’s Vegetal Life and Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh Su Chiu-Hua (Soochow University)

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of the non-human others reveal his peculiar notion of the world which subverts scientific taxonomy: the earth was covered with “papillæ,” the hawk’s circle in the sky embodied his thought; the ice “honey-combed” in spring; his body “grew. . . like corn” in summer. As one of the most mysterious passages in “Spring” shows, “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.” Pondering over the foliaceous pattern manifest on the sandy hill as the frozen clay was melting in spring, Thoreau portrayed the formation of worldly things --plants, animals, rocks, human body-- as the result of unceasing labor of intertwining, weaving, folding, and imbricating. In this essay, I would like to show that Thoreau’s endeavors to blur the distinctions between the organic/inorganic, animal/plant, matter/spirit not only challenge the traditional ontology shall learn, since for you alone will I accomplish all these things./ And you shall stop the force of the tireless winds which on earth/blowing in gusts destroy the farmer’s field./And again, if you wish, you shall stir up winds as requital;/And you shall produce from black rain timely drought/for human beings, and you shall produce from summer drought/tree-nourishing streams, which will flow through the upper air,/and you shall bring back from Hades the life-force of a dead man.” that treats things as static entities but also put the idea of “life” into question. To strengthen my argument, I would like to draw Thoreau and Merleau-Ponty into dialogue. In the unfinished project of “Intertwining—the Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty attempted to advance a notion that has not been thought of in traditional philosophy, “flesh.” As the “incarnate principle,” flesh “makes the fact be a fact” by the work of “interweaving,” “enfolding,” and “crisscrossing.” Hence, the seer is embodied in the thickness of the world and there is a “kinship” between the seer and the visibles. Despite the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to biology has been well studied in recent years, I would try to broaden the scope of flesh by starting to investigate its vegetal metaphors, such as, the body is “a being of two leaves,” the kinship between the seer and the visibles resembles “two halves of oranges,” and vision occurs at the “dehiscence” of world’s Flesh. Hopefully, the confluence of Merleau-Ponty and Thoreau would provide a fertile ground for the idea of “vegetal life” to grow. I will try to argue that “vegetal life”, serving as the under-lining of all things, organic or inorganic, has a strong potential in making significant contributions to the contemporary reflections upon biopolitics and its ethics.

A2 Presenter Biographies

Richard Hutchins

Aslaug Nyrnes is a professor at Bergen University College, Norway. Her most recent publications are “Om ikkje anna må det vere setningar der – Odda bibliotek og det litterære Odda” (in print, 2015, “If nothing else there ought to be sentences there – The Library of Odda and Odda as a literary place”), “The Series – Serial work in artistic research and in the didactics of the arts” (2013, InFormation), “Kunnskapstopologi” (2012, The topology of knowledge”, Kunnskapens språk. Skrivearbeid som forskningsmetode).

Su Chiu-Hua is an associate professor in the English Department at Soochow University, Taiwan. Her study interests include: phenomenology, animal studies, magic studies, and posthumanism.

A3: Pathways to Understanding Climate Change

Barbara Bodenhorn has been working in the Alaskan Arctic since 1980 and in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico since 2004. Her interest in environmental knowledge and how it is learned stems from the mid-1990s. She is currently a Senior Research Associate with the Department of Social Anthropology and a Fellow Emerita at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Elsa Lee is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, working on an interdisciplinary AHRC funded projec. Elsa has a long-held interest in environmental education and children's participation. She has taught Biology in secondary schools in both England and Mexico. The focus of her doctoral study at the University of Bath was children's appropriation of active citizenship attributes through participation in primary school eco-clubs.

Tom Moorhouse is a strange hybrid being, half children's author and half research ecologist (an entity probably not called an "authologist"). His debut novel The River Singers was nominated for the 2015 Carnegie Medal and longlisted for the 2015 UKLA and 2014 Branford Boase awards, and follows the adventures of a family of water voles as they battle to escape a new and terrible enemy. Its sequel The Rising sees the voles facing their most dangerous enemy of all: the Great River herself. He works for Oxford University, writes for himself and is published by Oxford University Press. His books have so far been translated into six languages.

David Whitley is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University, where he teaches film, poetry and children’s literature. He is particularly interested in the way the arts, especially poetry and film, offer different forms of understanding and engagement with the natural world. His most recent book is The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation: from Snow White to WALL•E (2012).

A4: Creaturely Lives and Liminal Knowledges

Cryptozoology and the Creatures of the Deep John Miller (University of Sheffield)

The Belgian natural historian Bernard Heuvelmans (1916-2001) was a man with an unconventional array of interests. Completing a PhD in the classification of aardvark teeth at the Free University of Brussels in 1939, he escaped four times from Nazi prisoner of war camps to make an unlikely living as a stand-up comedian and jazz singer in post-war Paris. But it was his contribution to an esoteric branch of science, or perhaps more accurately pseudo-science, that constitutes his most notable legacy. Heuvelmans is widely recognised as ‘the father of cryptozoology’, an enterprise he explains as the ‘study of animal forms the existence of which is based ... on material proof judged insufficient by some’. Throughout a prolific writing career, Heuvelmans battled tirelessly, but with little success, to establish the credibility of an endeavour widely viewed with scorn as the territory of cranks, hobbyists and fraudsters. Cryptozoology’s marginality is not so much the result of its central claim that there are many species existing unrecognised by science, but more to do with what are, undoubtedly, methodological problems. Cryptids, as these lost creatures are known by aficionados, are beasts of rumour, hearsay and legend. Heuvelmans’ work bestrides the zoological and the folkloric, forcing the two cultures into an uncomfortable intimacy in which narrative is reimagined as evidence. This paper focusses on Heuvelmans’ 1965 monograph In the Wake of Sea Serpents to explore how cryptozoology reconceives processes of knowledge formation. I argue that cryptozoology’s hybridity (part rational scientific endeavour, part flight of fancy) surrounds it with a notable irony. For all the commitment of enthusiasts like Heuvelmans, cryptozoology retains a specific investment in its own failure. As soon as a cryptid is found, it stops being a cryptid; the fascination of its secrecy is ruined by discovery. If the aim of cryptozoology is to bring secret creatures to light, there remains paradoxically an aesthetic frisson in their concealment that emerges as an unavoidably literary concern.

Knowledge of the Gaze: Focalisation through the Lens of Zoonarratology Roman Bartosch (University of Cologne)

The gaze is a crucial ethical concern in contemporary scholarship, especially when it comes to human-animal encounters. Studies of the human or animal gaze, drawing on Lacanian, gender, or postcolonial work but mostly on Levinasian ethics, often ascertains that the visual encounter with an ‘other’ constitutes the Other and, thus, the Self in genuinely ethical and singular terms. Sight moreover is the primary means through which knowledge and environmental orientation is acquired. The notion of the significance of visual perception and contact has its own history in Western thought, however, which links it to logocentric anthropocentrism and a certain hostility to the phenomenological acceptance of the ‘empire of the senses’ (Hovens) more generally. My paper will set out to discuss this problem from a (zoo)narratological perspective as developed by David Herman and by discussing several instances of human-animal gazes engendered and narrated through focalisation techniques. The immanently human perspective of literary texts and the likewise immanent event of creating luminal forms of knowledge through the experience of alterity, which literature is capable of producing, will be brought together in interpretations of Anglophone and German literary examples. In so doing, I will link narratological description and the implications of the narrative deep and surface structure for forms of reception and interpretation.

At the Ends of Man: The Human Animal and the Zooanthropology of American Frontiers Dominik Ohrem (University of Cologne)

‘Passing across borders or the ends of man,’ as Jacques Derrida puts it, ‘I come or surrender to the animal – to the animal in itself, to the animal in me, to the animal at unease with itself.’ Derrida’s notion of the “ends of man” is ambiguous: it may refer to the ultimate purpose or telos of mankind, point towards some conception of a posthuman temporality or ontology, but it also evokes a decidedly spatial imagery particularly in its combination with the concept of the border. I will take Derrida’s philosophical ruminations as a point of departure for a historical discussion of the ‘metaphysics’ of the border in relation to the questions of human identity, human nature and the anxious dynamic of recognition- disavowal of the human as animal. My paper’s focus will be on the specifically American manifestation of the phenomenon of the border embodied by the (interwoven) material, discursive and imaginary spaces of the Western frontier, which marked the progress of the nation’s territorial expansion and, throughout the nineteenth-century, became firmly entrenched in the American cultural imaginary. The heroics of Manifest Destiny notwithstanding, the frontier also produced an undercurrent of anxiety that haunted the grandiose fantasies of continental dominance emerging in the early 1800s. Even though many celebrated expansion as a vital aspect of the United States’ rise to greatness, others showed concerns about the effects of the frontier experience on both individuals and the character of the nation as a whole – concerns that were often centered on the problem of the human-animal boundary. Did the ‘savage’ geographies of westward expansion reinforce or subvert the discursive bifurcation of human-animal difference? Did they encourage modes of life beyond the normative framework of ‘civilized’ humanity? Such concerns were personified by the figure of the frontiersman, an ambiguous hero whose loyalty to civilization and even his humanity remained questionable. My paper will particularly focus on what may be characterized as a contemporary ‘zooanthropology’ of the frontier, a variety of folk knowledges that circulated less in scientific circles than in the broader cultural sphere in the writings of historians, literati, businessmen and others. Taken together, these zooanthropological attempts at coming to terms with the liminal geographies and ontologies of the frontier serve to underline the fragility of American ‘man’ as an animal profoundly at unease with itself.

A4 Presenter Biographies

John Miller is lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sheffield and general secretary of ASLE-UKI. He is the author of Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem 2012) and Walrus (with Louise Miller, Reaktion, 2014). He is currently working on two projects: Fur: A Literary History of Agony and Desire and Zooheterotopias: Habitat, Memory and the Creatures of the Cold War.

Roman Bartosch is senior lecturer at the University of Cologne. He has published on postcolonial and posthumanist theory and (zoo)narratology. He is the author of EnvironMentality – Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (Rodopi 2013) and editor, together with Sieglinde Grimm, of Teaching Environments: Ecocritical Encounters (2014) and currently works on a book on the transcultural evolution of werewolf narratives.

Dominik Ohrem teaches Anglo-American history at the University of Cologne. His research and teaching focuses on U.S.-histories of gender and race, environmental history, animal studies and feminist theory. He is currently working on his dissertation with the (working) title ‘Creatures of the West: Masculinity, Animality and Multispecies Lives on Nineteenth- Century American Frontiers’.

A5: Scottish Landscape Poetics

Fault Lines, Right to Roam, and the Shirakawa Barrier: Radical Landscape Poetics in Scotland David Borthwick (University of Glasgow)

Between 2010 and 2011, Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay undertook a journey through Scotland guided by Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Cockburn and Finlay transplant fifteenth century Japan onto twenty-first century Scotland via a ‘mirror-map’, Edo becoming Edinburgh, Shitomae the mountain Ben Dorain.3 Their journey begins proper as they pass through the Shirakawa Barrier, which for Bashō marked a ‘checking station’, an administrative controlpoint before his journey to the true north began. Gerry Loose’s recent Fault Line (2014) is a book-length documentation of the area close to the Faslane Nuclear Deterrent facility in West Scotland. The poem focuses on knowledge through vigilance: ‘oak / birch / fern / hazel’—a working knowledge of the bioregion—but this also includes military signage: ‘report anything suspicious’.’4 The Land Reform Scotland Act (2003) gave all citizens the ‘Right to Roam’ responsibly, enshrining in law unhindered access to open countryside. Yet Finlay and Cockburn question different kinds of access as they patrol the Far North, and Loose finds himself corralled in the West. In Edward Casey’s terms, the land is still divided by borders and boundaries: some physical and some merely implied.35 Knowing and unknowing landscape will form the main theme of this paper, in which I will argue that varying kinds of knowledge are contested and politicised even in the most remote Scottish landscapes, and I will discuss ways in which experimental poetics delights in its own brand of trespassing, using new law to reveal old habits.

Re-establishing the Oikos: The Ecopoetry of Hugh MacDiarmid Caroline Rae (University of Amsterdam)

That the Scottish landscape features prominently in Hugh MacDiarmid’s work has only recently garnered attention from an ecocritical perspective. Louisa Gairn, in particular, has suggested strong links between ecology and MacDiarmid, asserting his work was heavily influenced by his relationship with Scottish ecologist Patrick Geddes and claims his work is a form of ‘ecopoetics’ – a mode of writing that does not seek a transcendence of nature but a re-evaluation of the relationship between the human and non-human worlds that does not

3 Alec Finlay and Ken Coburn, the road north (Bristol: Shearsman, 2014), p. 31. 4 Gerry Loose, Fault Line (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2014), p. 24 5 Edward S. Casey, ‘Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History’, Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 507 – 512 (p. 508) privilege one over the other.6 Developing this notion of ecopoetics further, this paper will argue that MacDiarmid utilises poetry as a means of reconnecting with the oikos. As the Greek prefix for ‘eco’, oikos is defined as that which is ‘home’, ‘domestic’ or ‘dwelling place’. Lyotard interrogates the term further, describing it as an implicit, original connection to humanity’s habitat and claiming ‘ecology’ is consequently all that has not ‘become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systematic and that can never become any of these things’.7 Believing discourse to have disrupted and suppressed humanity’s fundamental connection to the oikos, Lyotard claims it is through literature and writing that this can be re-established. Focusing particularly on On a Raised Beach and with reference to The Eemis Stane and My Songs are Kandym in the Wasteland, this paper therefore seeks to firmly position MacDiarmid within the field of ecocriticism, suggesting his techniques and style allow for a critical re-examination of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

“Everything else is provisional”: Dwelling in Kathleen Jamie’s Writing Monika Szuba (University of Gdansk)

On the crossroads between landscape, language and history, Kathleen Jamie’s work is concerned with interrelations between land and writing. Following deep green poetics, it recognises intrinsic value in nature and renegotiates our place in the world. The major concerns in Jamie’s early poetry collections – national and gender identity – have yielded to the examination of the natural world in her latest poetry volumes The Tree House (2004) and The Overhaul (2012), as well as the essay collections Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012). Offering quiet resistance in the face of environmental degradation, Jamie points to the neccessity to find one’s dwelling place, exploring old and new ways of moving through a landscape. Her pared down, minimalistic style emerges from watchful listening. Limpid language is accompanied by its musicality: elliptical sentences and economical use of poetic devices are the main characteristics of Jamie’s style. This paper aims to examine Jamie's engagement with the natural world across the nature and culture divide. It attempts to study poetic explorations of home in the context of the concept of dwelling, and it seeks to provide an analysis of its ontological and temporal aspects. Further, it will discuss how these negotiations are related to diverse ways of knowing the world, demonstrating longing for unity and wholeness present in Jamie’s poetry and essays. Finally, it aims to analyse selected texts considering both their thematic aspects and technical aspects.

A5 Presenter Biographies

David Borthwick

Caroline Rae is a recent English Literature Master's graduate from the University of Amsterdam where she wrote her thesis on Contemporary Scottish Gothic. Prior to that, Caroline completed her Bachelor's in English Literature and German at the University of Edinburgh.

Monika Szuba completed her PhD on the subject of strategies of contestation in the novels of contemporary Scottish women authors. She has published a number of articles on

6 Gairn, Louisa. ‘MaDiarmid and Ecology’. The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 82-96. 7 Lyotard, Jean Francois. ‘Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded’. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed Laurence Coupe. Oxon: Routledge, 2000. 135 -138. contemporary fiction and poetry. She is co-organizer of International Literary Festival BETWEEN in Sopot, Poland. She is also co-editor of the between.pomiędzy series published by the University of Gdańsk Press and one of the founding members of the Textual Studies Research Group as well as the Scottish Studies Research Group at the University of Gdańsk. Her research interests include contemporary British poetry and prose.

A6: STORIES OF CHANGE 1: Energy stories, energy histories

Narrating Catastrophe: Oral and Fictional Histories of the Torrey Canyon Oil Spill Timothy Cooper (University of Exeter)

The Torrey Canyon oil disaster in Cornwall 1967 remains a key turning point in the politics of the contemporary global energy regime. The wreck of the ‘jumboised’ oil tanker registered in ecological terms the effects of the transformation of the global political economy of energy distribution and technological transformation in the wake of the Suez crisis. Its effects were profound both in terms of environmental politics and cultural appropriations of the imagery of the disaster. In this paper I draw upon two ways of narrating the disaster. Firstly, by drawing on a series of oral history interviews conducted with people present at, or participant in, the subsequent clean-up operation. Secondly by drawing upon autobiographical and fictional narratives inspired by the disaster and subsequent similar spills, most particularly Hammond Innes’ The Black Tide, an account of the repetition of the Torrey Canyon incident in the form of the fictional subsequent wreck of another tanker, the Petros Jupiter off Lands’ End. Through comparison of the different narratives offered in the oral and fictional histories of the post Torrey Canyon world, I reflect on the nature of the differences between formal and popular environmentalism, the meaning of environmental disasters, and complex distinctions in accounts of relationships between capital, energy and everyday life.

Stories and the Sea: George Mackay Brown, Bakhtin, and the future of Marine Renewables in Orkney and beyond Rebecca Ford (Orkney)

The town of Stromness in Orkney was home to poet George Mackay Brown, and in recent years has become the location of development in Marine Renewable Energy (MRE). Brown’s work, celebrating the rhythms and cycles of life and humanity’s struggle for survival, often rails against progress and the advance of technology, while arguing for the importance of the role of the poet in a community, and the power of word and story to articulate the relationship between humans and their environment. This paper, moves from Brown’s writing about Stromness and the sea, to consider contemporary narratives, both within and out with Orkney, about the role of MRE as part of humanity’s response to the challenge of meeting future energy demands while addressing the dangers of climate change. In looking at narratives and storytelling about MRE from a dialogical perspective, it will consider how the process of storytelling, and the contexts and relationships this involves, influence meaning making and understanding at every level, from the local to the global. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin it will argue that the importance of storytelling, identified by Brown, lies in its ability to engage and affect individuals on a personal level, with the power of any narrative lying in the interaction between individually persuasive, and socially authoritative discourse. Just as Stromness and Orkney are evoked and interpreted for many through the words of George Mackay Brown, the future of MRE depends on which stories get told and who gets to tell them.

Narratives of history and energy Nicola Whyte (University of Exeter)

The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative history of energy, one that is deeply embedded in the history of everyday life and the production and reproduction of community relations in the pre-industrial past. In recent years important work has been carried out by economic and environmental historians in quantifying energy consumption since the sixteenth century. This has added to our understanding of carbon consumption over a much longer timeframe, while also revealing the diverse energy ‘mix’ that people relied upon in the past. In particular, analyses of pre-industrial energy regimes have situated human labour and animal power at the forefront of discussion. For heating, cooking and early industrial processes a diverse range of energy sources was also tapped, including wood, peat, charcoal, coal, water, and wind. It is the history of renewable sources of energy - wind and water power - that is of particular concern here. It will be argued that History offers a vital context for rethinking and reimagining what a low carbon landscape might look like now and in the future. It is not only the material evidence that concerns us, for an understanding of the socio-political production and reproduction of everyday life in the past has a great deal to offer in understanding and reinvigorating the politics of energy from below. In the early modern period the production of energy was an integral component of social systems of exchange and was deeply embedded in forging communities of practice.

Presenter Biographies

Timothy Cooper

Rebecca Ford

Nicola Whyte

Panel Session B: Wednesday 2nd September 3.00pm-4.30pm

B1: Towards an ecological understanding of collaborative practices with and between art and poetry, place and landscape II

Glossing / Trespassing / Annotating: Forest Expectation Sites Amy Cutler (University of Leeds)

the edge of forest exacts a fine trespass – Peter Larkin

This paper considers literally marginal methodologies for knowledge: the REF-side-lined practices of glossing, annotating, and parsing. The exhibition Forest Exhibition Sites (2015) presented the works of the essayist and poet Peter Larkin via thirty artists’ and scholars’ interventions with fragments of his text. I will use these speculative intertexts – Larkin’s work scribbled over and re-vocalised by contributors including Richard Skelton, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Skinner, and Emma Mason – to consider the place of new material cultures of scholarship within green knowledge. Drawing on canonical discussions of both written marginalia and its facsimiles (Jackson, 2001) and of printed para-textual traditions, from Valéry’s ‘Quelques fragments de Marginalia’ (1927) to Derrida’s ‘Tympan’ (1972), I will discuss the ecological worth of these modern “specimen” commentaries, including revived forms in The Glossator as well as the new journals Para·text and Prac Crit. In the second half of the paper I will focus on the exhibition’s materials, showing how these notations of the paper archive respond to the ecology of disturbed forest sites. Larkin’s own writings explore violable woodlands as vandalized texts, process points, and ‘resource opportunities out of which cultures can be remade’.8His treatments of land stratification and the different tiers of managed and natural space recognise woodland as open, cut-into, and worked over. These concerns for edge-lands, access points and ‘disturbance regime(s)’9 are materialized in the invasive practices of his readers. “Taking a leaf” from the American poet Susan Howe’s punning on forests and bibliographic archives, the gloss-excursions in Forest Expectation Sites combine as a group study of the page as index to the natural world. From Macfarlane’s pigmented textual cuttings to Sarah Howe’s transplanting of broken-off cultures of the willow in Chinoiserie, the collection also traces the textual genetics of the forest as a space that allows for deletion, insertion, and revision. This paper explores both scholarly means to knowledge and the copious human annotation of these transition spaces, just ‘as forest became copious wood culture’,10 transposed from the vandalized margins of “civilization”.

Halse for hazel by Frances Presley with images by Irma Irsara Frances Presley

Halse for hazel is a book of trees. It explores the languages and visual patterns we use for them, especially those used by or for women. It was written in dialogue with the images of Irma Irsara. ‘Halse’ is Exmoor dialect for hazel, as noted by local historian Hazel Eardley-Wilmot: a convergence of names which initiates a new poetic syntax of marginal trees and tongues. Tree languages, which include local dialect, as well as ancient and runic scripts, are analysed and reassembled. Halse also draws on the languages of forestry, botany and the naming of trees, with their male bias. Direct experience of trees in the landscape is equally significant in Halse and in Presley and Irsara’s collaboration. It includes poems and images created on site, at or even inside trees. The reinvention of poetic language and visual form is often shaped by the inventiveness of wild trees, which evolve in all kinds of surprising ways, such as ancient birch migrating horizontally along the ground, sending up new shoots. Halse for hazel has three sections, Halse, Col and Hassel: alternate and playful names for hazel, which map wide ranging geographic and linguistic areas, as well as political and environmental pressures. The paper will focus on some key images and texts from the book which include migrating birch; the burning of wood; and rare whitebeam species.

Deerhart: Deconstructing the Nature / Culture Boundary via Experimental Art and Poetry Yvonne Reddick

Deerhart is a collaborative ecopoetry and visual art installation. An accompanying poetry and art pamphlet has been commissioned by the experimental poetry publisher Knives, Forks and Spoons press. The project is the result of the first phase of a partnership between the British painter, printmaker and sculptor Diana Zwibach, and the British-Swiss poet and ecopoetics scholar Yvonne Reddick. Deerhart moves forwards from deep time, unearthing

8 Peter Larkin, ‘Innovation Contra Acceleration’, boundary 2 vol. 26 no. 1 (1999), p. 173. 9 Peter Larkin, Leaves of Field (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2006), p. 77. 10 Peter Larkin, ibid., p. 73. knowledge about extinct creatures, towards contemporary encounters between humans and nonhuman animals. Deerhart challenges Jonathan Skinner’s assertion that “The true north of ecopoetics is sound,”11 by creating hybrid poetry/visual art installations whose visual aspects are as important as their sound. The poems and artworks expand upon Gander and Kinsella’s theory that the ‘syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics,’ and engage with their idea that ‘our perceptual experience is mostly palimpsestic’.12 Zwibach’s layered charcoal artworks resonate with Gander and Kinsella’s theories, while the interruption of Zwibach’s images into the text of Reddick’s open-form poems creates a more radical visual dimension than Gander and Kinsella envisage. Reddick and Zwibach focus especially on women’s experiences and women’s encounters with female creatures. Deerhart draws on research by feminist critics, such as Haraway’s seminal work on cyborgs as ‘hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures’;13 the poems imagine what such hybrids would say if they had a voice. In contemporary poetry, ‘the inner self/outer world distinction so dear to nature poetry through the ages has become outdated’.14 Deerhart aims to deconstruct the perceived boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to privilege women’s experiences, and to push the boundaries of poetic and artistic practice.

B1 Presenter Biographies

Amy Cutler is a curator, researcher, and currently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Leeds. She received her doctorate in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London, after completing degrees in English Literature at Oxford. She writes on late twentieth century poetry and British geography; she also founded the cultural geography themed cinema PASSENGERFILMS, and has twice in a row received the national award from the British Federation of Film Societies for her work curating film for research. In June 2013 she curated the exhibition Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig, on forests, history, and social / environmental memory, in collaboration with the Kew Museum of Economic Botany and the UCL Dendrochronology Laboratory. She was recently selected for AHRC Science in Culture’s 2014 shortlist of fifteen early career researchers in the UK doing inspiring work in arts-science collaboration, and is currently the lead academic on a new White Rose network across Leeds, Sheffield, and York, Hearts of Oak: Caring for British Forests, which will include site-specific events related to forest research in the humanities across 2015. As well as the forthcoming Peter Riley: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015), she is currently editing an experimental collaborative book of philosophical essays, Were X A Tree, for Punctum Books, due 2015.

Frances Presley grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in London. She studied literature at East Anglia and Sussex universities. She was a librarian in community development and at the Poetry Library. Publications include The Sex of Art, 1987; Hula Hoop, 1993; Linocut, 1997; Neither the One nor the Other, an email text and performance with Elizabeth James, 1999; Automatic Cross Stitch with artist Irma Irsara, 2000; Somerset

11 Jonathan Skinner, ecopoetry workshop at the University of Warwick, April 2013. 12 Forrest Gander and John Kinsella, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2012), p. 2. 13 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge 1991), 1. 14 Harriet Tarlo, ‘Women and ecopoetics: an introduction in context.’ How 2 3.2 (Summer 2008) 1-24 (p. 15). letters, 2002; Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003; Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2005; Lines of Sight, 2009; Stone settings, a collaboration with Tilla Brading, 2010; An Alphabet for Alina with drawings by Peterjon Skelt, 2012; and Halse for hazel, 2014. Her work is in various anthologies including Infinite Difference, 2010, and Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry, 2011. She has translated Norwegian poets Hanne Bramness and Lars Amund Vaage. She has written essays and reviews, especially on British women poets, and also for Cusp: recollections of poetry in transition, 2012.

Yvonne Reddick is a poet, environmental writer and researcher. She holds a Research Fellowship in Modern English and World Literatures at the University of Central Lancashire, concurrently with Visiting Fellowships at the University of Liverpool and Wolfson College, Cambridge. She read English at Cambridge and received her PhD on Ted Hughes’s ecopoetry from the University of Warwick. Her first monograph, The ‘Greening’ of Ted Hughes: Environment, Animals and Ecopoetry, is under review by Oxford University Press, and her academic articles have been published in English, Cambridge Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment and Modern Language Review. Her published poetic work includes open-form visual poetry, palimpsestic screen prints, and translations from Congolese, Chilean and Medieval French poets. Her next pamphlet, Deerhart, a collaboration with the artist Diana Zwibach, has been commissioned by the experimental poetry publisher Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. She is beginning a new ecocritical research project on the Congo and Niger in English and French-language literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

B2: Limits and New Directions

Knowing Genre, Knowing Nature? A Narratologically-Inflected Approach To Ecocriticism And Genre Astrid Bracke (University of Amsterdam)

The proposed paper foregrounds the importance of literary genre in the ways we imagine, narrate and understand the world. It seeks to position genre as a key category within ecocriticism. Consequently, it will provide a framework for a narratologically-inflected ecocriticism (drawing on Herman, Lehtimäki and others), which differs from the reader- response approach to genre dominant in ecocriticism that evaluates genres as suitable or unsuitable to ecocritical aims (Kerridge; Kluwick). The paper argues that a textual, literary landscape is never just a representation, but always determined by the narratological elements that shape it – just as extratextual landscapes are the product of their historical, political, cultural and environmental circumstances. Asking questions about a text's narratological aspects leads to a fuller and more extensive ecocritical analysis that emphasizes the effects that different ways of telling – or framing – stories have on our narratives of nonhuman natural environments. After a brief theoretical discussion of the parameters of my approach, I’ll apply it to two genres that explicitly reconceptualize nature in the Anthropocene – clifi and new British nature writing. I'll demonstrate that it is not so much the kinds of natural landscapes or environmental crises depicted that determine how we interpret nature in these works, but rather their genre. In this respect I'll also engage with environmental humanities' calls for new narratives of the Anthropocene, and suggest that we don't just need new narratives but also more understanding of the way in which existing stories work on a narratological level, and thereby shape our experiences of nature.

Inspire Lecture: Animal Lives, Binary Opposition and Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer

Hayden Gabriel (University of St Mark and St John)

The paper explores ways in which notions of binary opposition inform perceptions of human relationships with non-human species, charting the challenge Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer, makes to those dualistic assumptions, not least through its bringing together of literature and science and in its depiction of more sustainable ways of being.

Is There A Thing It Is Like To Be Adonis? Raphael Lyne (University of Cambridge)

In Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, I will argue, there are moments where the interior worlds of a horse, a hare, a boar, and a goddess, are vividly evoked. The only significant human presence, however, remains opaque. In the environmentally-aware Shakespeare criticism of Robert Watson, Gabriel Egan, and Simon Palfrey, it's apparent that the problem of other minds is an ecological problem. How we go about deciding whether we can know what it is like to be a bat (Thomas Nagel's classic question, turned over in Peter Hacker's essay 'Is There a Thing it is Like to be a Bat?') has consequences for how we conceive of an interconnected, interdependent world, or don't. I will focus most of all on what a poem, and the criticism of a poem, can contribute to our thinking about interfaces between heterophenomenology (Daniel Dannett's contested term) and environmentalism.

B2 Presenter Biographies

Astrid Bracke

Hayden Gabriel Hayden Gabriel is Programme Leader for English and Creative Writing at the University of St Mark and St John, Plymouth. A graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, Hayden’s first two novels, The Quickening Ground and A Wonderful Use for Fire were published by Macmillan in the UK, and by Simon and Schuster in the USA. Both works explore our relationship with landscape and with non-human creatures. ‘Which stories might we be telling now in the hope of forming part of a coherent and useful response to environmental crisis?’ is the question at the centre of Hayden’s PhD in Creative Writing. It’s a question her third novel, The Returning, seeks to answer – as, indeed, has all her creative output and academic research.

Raphael Lyne

B3: Pre-20th Century Natural Histories

Environment, Material Agency, and Evolutionary Decline in Late Victorian Science and Fiction Clare Echterling (University of Kansas)

One of the goals of the new materialisms is to theorize the agency of matter. Such work seeks to break from the Cartesian view, which defines matter as inert and uniform, by showing how matter is in fact quite lively and agentic. The new materialisms also emphasize the “trans-corporeality” of human beings (Alaimo), arguing that we are not only material beings, but also always coming into contact with other material entities, which affect us in significant ways. I identify a similar recognition in the writings of Victorian authors and scientists who had realized in the wake of the Darwinian revolution that white races were subject to the same material processes as nonwhite peoples and animals. Writers such as Charles Kingsley, H.G. Wells, and scientists like James Hunt all describe nonhuman nature and evolutionary processes in ways that acknowledge matter’s agency. The late Victorian recognition of material agency was considerably darker than recent theorizations that use matter’s vitality as a basis for environmental politics. The unpredictability of material processes, and the human’s vulnerability to them, was a source of anxiety for the Victorians, who were deeply invested in maintaining their own supposed evolutionary superiority. An important question for 19th century scientists such as Hunt, then, was whether or not specific environmental conditions caused degeneration. For Hunt and many others, the answer was yes. This presentation will briefly examine material agency in several scientific and fictional writings of environmentally wrought evolutionary decline while considering the racial and environmental implications of such representations.

Charles Darwin’s Postmortem Natural History: Decomposing the Earth Through the Action of Worms Sarah Bezan (University of Alberta)

In Darwin’s Worms, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that Darwin’s final book on the earthworm (1881) is “obsessed by burial,” “counter-elegaic,” and representative of a kind of “secular after-life: the life of the world that continues after one’s own death.” Imagining such a world - the world of being dead, of decomposition and reconstitution beyond the scope of an overseer - leads us to consider how natural history presumes the reliability of the postmortem organism (fossil, skeleton, etc) as a stable source of knowledge and an impervious record of the history of species adaptation, evolution, and extinction. But how does an encounter with what Jessica Mordsley calls the “terrifying, faceless, nameless long-dead animal other” create productive possibilities for thinking and un- thinking the constitution of the human and non-human animal in natural science? How, indeed, can we pinpoint the origin of humanity when the nonhuman animal remains entangled in the play of traces that is embedded within the DNA ancestry of every species? And how does recognizing the inter-connection of living and dead organisms - for example, the action of the worm on a decaying leaf - fortify an alternative view of the earth, or “world”? As I argue, Darwin’s notion that the earth is reconstituted and re-created through the digestive action of the earthworm leads to the view that the natural world exists in deep time, where organisms, whether living or dead, remain in a continuous state of change. Thus, in advancing a postmortem reading of natural history, this paper examines how Darwin’s later work on earthworms conceptualizes an alternative view of the world that emphasizes its capacity to recompose, disassemble and recreate itself through continual death and decomposition.

Natural Histories of the Colonial Caribbean Brycchan Carey (University of Kingston)

B3 Presenter Biographies

Clare Echterling

Sarah Bezan

Brycchan Carey

B4: Contemporary literatures and the possibilities and limits of knowing

The speculative real in contemporary fiction and theory: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and the limits of knowing Louise Squire (University of Portsmouth) At the frontier of contemporary theory, a question mark currently arises between the theoretics of phenomenology and those of the speculative real. Tom Sparrow (2014) refers to this question mark as ‘the end of phenomenology’, while Timothy Clark remarks: ‘all that is most challenging in the twenty-first century about the environmental crisis – politically, sociologically, and philosophically – can be gauged to the degree to which it challenges or even eludes altogether a phenomenological approach’ (2014: 284). If by phenomenology we mean the study of the experiential mode of the subject, or the ‘structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view’ (Woodruff-Smith 2003, updated 2013), then its “end” might be found in the emergence of the speculative real. The broad aim of speculative realism might be understood as the desire to ‘reconnect philosophy to the ‘great outside’ of the inhuman and ultimately contingent world’ (Padui 2011: 90-91). Accordingly, one of its key objectives is to overcome that difficulty of post-Kantian thought, defined by Meillassoux as ‘correlationism’, whereby: ‘All we ever engage with is what is given-to- thought, never an entity subsisting by itself’ (Meillassoux 2012: 36). Taking Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as its example, this paper will consider the ways in which contemporary fiction complicates the distinction between the phenomenological limits of human knowing and the speculative possibilities of thinking the unknowable.

Ways of knowing and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University)

There are many ways of knowing the ecological world in which (non)human existence transpires, and which is modified through that transpiration. One ontological and epistemological perspective, dominant in Western thought since the Enlightenment, has justified human mastery of nature. Such a position is associated with dualisms separating (inter alia) human/ nonhuman, body/ mind, rational male/ irrational female, rational civilised/ irrational savage. This way of knowing the world arguably leads ultimately towards an ethics that prioritises the human and justifies the instrumental use of the nonhuman, and which inhibits more ecological modes of thought, living, or organisation. Literature, through its imaginative content and narrative form, has the capacity to interrogate existing ways of knowing and to suggest alternatives. This paper examines how Ruth Ozeki’s 2012 novel A Tale for the Time Being works to tackle some of these dominant dualistic principles of cultural organisation. Through its framed and nested narrations, the textual instability of time and place, and the notion of what Ozeki has referred to as ‘interbeing’, the narrative tests distinctions and polarisations that constrain capacity to construct more ecologically and culturally equal and aware ways of being. Conventional boundaries of self, nation, place, and time are questioned. The capacity for pre-existing identity structures to break down becomes, conversely, a productive process, as the novel imagines different ways of understanding relationships between different cultures, and the place of the individual, in a globalised world.

The Green Woman: Ecofeminist Realities in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman Aisha Nazeer (University of St Andrews)

In his 1979 book The Tree John Fowles vehemently argues that the violent anthropocentricism of the dominant scientific perspective is responsible for our denigrated relationship with nature. Originating in Victorian conceptualisations of knowledge, Fowles critiques the ‘endless classifying and anatomising of Victorian biology –pigeonholing and cutting the (dead) subjects to pieces’. In a rousing diatribe, Fowles calls upon his reader to abandon this purely scientific lens, since ‘it is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science’s calculation […] that we habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground as separate events’. Through further reading of The Tree alongside examination of Fowles’ 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, this presentation will assess Fowles’ exploration of science as a patriarchal viewpoint which oppresses both women and nature. An ecofeminist reading will allow me to argue that Fowles’ most highly regarded novel censures the classificatory gaze of science characterised in Charles Smithson, the amateur scientist, in favour of the more feminine “total reality” of Sarah Woodruff. Despite ecofeminism launching after the publication of The Tree and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it will become clear that Fowles anticipated the critique of the patriarchal mutual oppression of women and nature, whilst acknowledging the need to actualise an ecofeminist reality through celebrating the relationship between women and the environment.

B4 Presenter Biographies

Louise Squire recently completed her doctoral studies at the University of Surrey. She is currently based at the University of Portsmouth and is working on a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation. She has published several articles, including in the prestigious Oxford Literary Review, and is co-editor of a book on Literature and Sustainability, forthcoming with Manchester University Press (2016). Louise is Web Officer for ASLE-UKI.

Emily Alder

Aisha Nazeer

B5: Dreams, Nightmares and Enchantments in Dreams, Nightmares and Enchantments in myth and story

Leviathan’s ecotopian dream of nature and machine in alliance Phoebe Chen (University of Cambridge) Alternative histories are known for their counterfactual speculations as to how scientific development and human progress would have been different. Leviathan (2009) by Scott Westerfeld is a young adult novel set in the first world war, which offers an alternative history of the relationship between man, nature, and technology. The novel’s premise is a clash of two modes of development, embodied in competing forms in the national cultures of Britain and Austria: genetic engineering discovered by Charles Darwin forms the foundation of the British Empire; while diesel machinery and inventions support Germany and Austria. When teen protagonists Deryn and Alek, representing opposing sides, join forces to negotiate peace between the two world powers, they initiate the pragmatic working out of a dream where nature and machine are not at odds with one another. In my presentation, I propose that Leviathan’s historical alterity operates as the catalyst for imagining a utopian world that sees scientific progress and its impact on man’s relationship with nature and technology in a positive light. Then, I explore how the novel constructs an environmental utopia where technology enhances nature’s capabilities without perverting its nature, form, and essence. Using the eponymous flying whale as an example, I argue that the novel offers its teen readers a revised ecology, in which man needs nature and technology as much as nature needs humanity and technology for their mutual survival.

Magic in Nature: Developing an Eco-Natural Theology within Children’s Fantasy Literature Meghann Hillier-Broadley (University of Northampton)

This paper will develop a theory of eco-natural theology utilising J R R Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, Alister McGrath’s renewed natural theology from The Open Secret, and aspects of eco-criticism in Jonathan Bates’ The Song of the Earth. Beginning with Tolkien’s man as sub-creator, this paper will examine how man has become part of shaping the fate of creation through attitudes towards nature, human and non-human in children’s fantasy literature. The theory of eco-natural theology will emerge out of Bates’ notion that man yearns to return to something he feels he has lost, the primal ‘state of nature’, which is exasperated by the divide between nature and society. McGrath’s renewed natural theology offers man a way to return to this ‘primal state’; reading nature from a Christian perspective allows man to identify aspects of truth, beauty and goodness in nature through the doctrine of incarnation, putting the Christian God and creation at the centre, rather than anthropocentric needs, allowing man to know and respond to nature in a different way. These aspects will be examined in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series through character and location to highlight ecological issues such as the destruction of creation for man’s own resources. This theory will create a new way of reading fantasy literature with the potential to identify a correlation between the decline and degradation of the natural world and man’s isolation from the Christian God and potentially discover solutions to return man to nature.

From the marvellous Indies to magical Macondo: Geopoetical myths on the Latin American natural world Francesca Zunino (King’s College London)

Bridging ecocriticism and ecolinguistics, this research analyzes how some narratological and discursive ‘marvellous’ categories used in Columbus’ earliest descriptions of the Indies can be traced in G. García Márquez’ Macondo (One Hundred years of Solitude, 1967) and its geopoetics. Columbus’ first voyage’s Letters (1493) apply the Latin and Medieval mirabile concept, stimulating awe for a deformed, magical natural world. This strategy is reapplied in the metaphorical word-place of Márquez’ mythical Macondo and its environment. Moreover, Columbus’ rhetorical over-simplification of the Indian nature - formed by one type of luxuriant landscape, and a verdant mystery - originated the mid-XX century tropicalist magical realism’s portrait of a monothematic exotic, exciting but overwhelmingly wild forest, also charged with feminine clichés. Both Columbus’ and Márquez’ influential narratives use powerful rhetorical strategies such as metaphor, polysyndeton, hyperbole, prolepsis, repetition, and circularity, to inspire wonder towards an imaginary excessive, timeless nature. Additionally, the Western readers’ discovery of Macondo triggered an overflow of a prêt-a-porter, reductionist ‘Mc Ondo’ natural world in literary fiction. These hyperbolic, incommensurable environment’s early modern ‘invention’ and modern re- utilizations have established an emblematic, homogenizing stereotype for the highly diverse Latin American natural-cultural ecosystems. Therefore, both Latin American literature and environmental imagery need a ‘de-macondization’ process: this fictional nature can promote an anthropocentric, ecologically harmful disconnection between people and nature, as both the Western and Latin American readers often perceive the magical realist allegorical pseudo-environment as a space to be tamed more than accurately known and preserved.

B5: Presenter Biographies

Phoebe Chen

Meghann Hillier-Broadley has just entered her second year as a PhD student at the University of Northampton researching the relationship between the fantastic and Christianity in post-war children’s literature. She is also an Associate Lecturer in the English department delivering the module Reading Literary Genres. She previously studied at the University of Hull for a BA and MA in Theology and holds a BA in English from University of Northampton.

Francesca Zunino

B6: STORIES OF CHANGE 2: Images of energy

Crisis! What crisis?: A review of five decades of contradictory framings of energy and environment in broadcasting Joe Smith (Open University)

Public and political understandings and debates about energy and environmental change have developed in tandem with broadcast representations. Across half a century broadcasting has offered diverse and sometimes contradictory accounts of relations between society, energy and environment. The paper draws on close readings of broadcast materials; archival research and semi-structured interviews related to programming spanning the range of energy narratives generated by broadcasters over the last half century. The empirical material is drawn from the BBC broadcast and paper archives. It seeks both to connect sources and source materials to completed radio and TV outputs, and to consider the ways in which broadcast framings in turn might have shaped the shifting environmental politics of energy resources. The paper considers warnings of crisis and scarcity, as well as ambitions for stability and abundance. It explores shifts in the nature and range of energy narratives over time, and considers the specific role of public service broadcasting within wider debates about energy, environment and social progress. It will consider not just the programmes themselves, but also the specific channels and transmission slots, and hence demographics, being served by these varied framings. In parallel with exploring the broadcast content the paper will consider absent narratives. What stories about energy and society have not been told, and what other stories might broadcasters tell in future? The paper draws together strands from two AHRC funded projects: Stories of Change and Earth in Vision.

Gothic Energy: the iconology of energy in the documentary archive Helen Hughes (University of Surrey)

The history of documentary abounds with images of energy production and consumption. Non-fiction formats have contributed considerably to framing the debates about the global development of the coal, oil, and gas industries, nuclear energy, hydroelectricity, biofuels, wind energy, and solar power. In the course of these efforts at representation and argument an iconography of energy production and consumption has accumulated which, with time, has become a great depository of images of spent energy, reviewing, recalling and reviving the projects and associations that are now past. This paper comes out of a broader project “Gothic Energy” exploring the documentary archive as the embodiment of spent energy. The kinetic energy of the moving image in the present reanimates the world around energy production and consumption including the conceptualisation of energy itself – the source of warmth, heat, light, and movement - at the time the film was made. Part of the function of documentaries on energy has been the reconnection of energy to its sources once it became more abstract in the domestic sphere through the introduction of electricity into the home. This reconnection is now part of a history of ruins, preserved architecture, scarred landscapes. The paper will hence focus on the accumulation of the ghosts of energy, focussing particularly on the introduction of electricity and its role in the changing architecture and infrastructure of the home, exploring the how the representation of clean and invisible energy sources for the population connected with the corporate desire to celebrate the achievement of the extraction of energy from the earth’s resources, reappearing in the documentary film archive as history.

Energy biographies: narrative genres, lifecourse transitions and practice change Christopher Groves (University of Cardiff)

The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individuals use energy, taking advantage of such disruptive transitions to encourage individuals to be reflexive towards their lifestyles and how they use the technological infrastructures on which they rely. Such identifications, however, employ narratives of voluntary change which take an overly optimistic change of how individuals experience lifecourse transitions, and ignore effects of experiences of unresolved or unsuccessful transitions. Drawing on narrative interview data from the Energy Biographies project based at Cardiff University, we explore three case studies where effects of such unresolved transitions are significant. Using the concept of liminal transition as developed by Victor Turner, we examine instances where ‘progressive’ master narratives of energy use reduction clash with other ‘narrative genres’ which individuals use to make sense of change, based on experiences of transition. These clashes show how narratives which view lifecourse transitions as opportunities ignore the challenges that such transitions may pose to individual identity and thereby to interventions which position individuals as agents responsible for driving change.

B6: Presenter Biographies

Joe Smith

Helen Hughes

Christopher Groves

Panel Session C: Wednesday 2nd September 4.45pm-6.15pm

C1: Open Field Ecopoetics

“Could be anywhere on Earth and Time”: Environmental Consciousness Mapping in the Poetry of Joanne Kyger David Arnold (University of Worcester)

Increasingly, the formal innovations of poetry in the modernist tradition are being recognised as benevolent factors in both the production and critique of Green Knowledge. If the premise of ‘open-field’ poetics is that the page is the space of writing, then for Joanne Kyger this writing also provides ‘a graph of a mind moving’. In this paper, I will explore the implication of Kyger’s ‘consciousness mapping’ with her environmental and ethical concern for the Mexican regions of Oaxaca and Pátzcuaro. Inflected as it is by the Buddhist doctrine of Codependent Origination, according to which all things arise simultaneously, Kyger’s practice of ‘scoring’ mental phenomena presents interesting possibilities for what Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, describes as “the temporalities of place”. (2011, 18) On the one hand, the mobility of ‘consciousness mapping’, its apprehension of transitory phenomena, allows Kyger to render the sometimes quick transition from vernacular to official landscapes. On the other hand, a writing practice informed both by Olsonian poetics and by the doctrine of Codependent Origination is well placed to reconfigure Western models of scale, to “…strategically render visible vast force fields of interconnectedness against the attenuating effects of temporal and geographical distance.” (Nixon, 2011, 38) I will chart these possibilities in relation to two short poetry collections by Kyger: Pátzcuaro (1999) and God Never Dies (2004).

‘A field folded’: Green Knowledge and Post-war American Poetics Mandy Bloomfield (University of Plymouth)

Contemporary poets interested in engaging with ecology, space and place have frequently turned to ideas and practices associated with post-war American ‘open-field’ poetics. Whether avowedly or more obliquely, writers as various as Harriet Tarlo, Evelyn Reilly, Allen Fisher and John Kinsella have referred back to, and reworked, ‘open field’ composition. They have done so with a sharpened sense of ecological awareness in the context of increased environmental change and degradation. This paper will examine why this compositional mode has been so compelling for certain strands of contemporary ecopoetics. It will examine the entwined aesthetic and epistemological claims of the ‘open field’ as articulated by a nexus of American poets, including Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. These poets’ concept of ‘field,’ was informed by the new scientific ideas of their day, most especially in particle physics. But their understanding of this science was also mediated by their engagement with the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. My paper will explore how these ideas from science and philosophy helped shape ‘open field’ poetics. I will investigate how these ways of knowing contributed to these poets’ understanding of the poem as a form of dynamic interchange between energy and matter, and as oriented to a process of discovery. Drawing on examples from these writers’ poetry and statements of poetics, I will ask: what ‘stance toward reality’ (Olson) does this poetics imply? What are the ramifications of the ‘open field’ for ecological thinking? What forms of ‘green knowledge’ does it yield?

Open Field, Open Heart: Explorations of Joy in Maggie O’Sullivan and Harriet Tarlo Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (Newman University, Birmingham)

In her groundbreaking anthology The Ground Aslant, Tarlo suggests: “it is possible that poetry within the experimental tradition could be particularly powerful in its contribution to the necessary mental and emotional adjustments to environment that we need, urgently, to make.”15 Such mental adjustments have, arguably, become familiar terrain in the field of ecopoetics, where many practitioners incorporate indeterminacy as a formal constraint working to bring chance and turbulence into the foreground of our Green Knowledge.16 What is less clear is how, and where, emotion figures in these experimental poetries which resist habitual epiphanies. Olson’s ‘process’ of the open field involves a spur to movement, to “keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions” - a kind of engaged liveliness also encountered in the poetries of O’Sullivan and Tarlo, where both poets re-imagine the space of the page to enact simultaneously sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. Through a lens of poethics and affect, this paper focuses on the poets’ exhibits at the ecopoetics exhibitions I curated, Skylines (2009) and The Trembling Grass (2014), to explore the ways that both employ an open field poetics that dares to access and reconfigure pleasure at a time of environmental pain.

C1 Presenter Biographies

David Arnold

Mandy Bloomfield

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

C2: Poetics of Climate

The Persona’s Communion With Nature In Lorna Crozier’s Small Mechanics Núria Mina Riera (University of Lleida)

One of the main tenets of both ecocriticism and ecopoetry is the interconnection and interdependence of all the living and non-living things in the world. This interrelationship is present throughout Lorna Crozier’s poetry by means of the persona’s communion with nature. That is, the persona is outside, in the street or in nature, and she first observes either animals or other natural elements to gradually establish an interconnection between herself and the natural element, either by a deep understanding of the natural element, or by reproducing the howls of the animal the persona is observing. The two poetry collections by Lorna Crozier in which the persona’s communion with nature figures more prominently are The Weather (1983) and Small Mechanics (2011). This paper contends that Crozier’s personae and their more-than-human-world experiences fit in Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic’s comment about the state of ecocriticism in that Crozier’s poems “contribut[e] to the understanding of the human relationship to the planet” (Adamson and Slovic, 2009: 6). In this sense, Crozier asserted in an interview with Elizabeth Philips that one of the reasons why she is so fond of animals is that by observing them she broadens her perception about

15 Harriet Tarlo, ed. The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Exeter: Shearsman, 2011, 10.

16 As outlined in Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. the world (Philips, 2002: 146). Actually, nature is portrayed in Crozier’s poems as an entity that is not tame, or a mere locus amoenus, but one which may be dangerous and hard to live in. The fact that Crozier’s personae are able to appreciate, internalise and establish connections with an environment that is both enchanting and challenging at the same time implies a deep engagement to the world that surrounds us, and ultimately a profound care about environmental concerns.

‘Is/Is not’: Metaphor and the Wonder of Climate Change Isabel Galleymore (University of Exeter)

Wonder is frequently understood as a perceptual mode that leads to greater connections with natural environments. Yet, in environmental literature there is a fine line between wonder and an author’s mystical flight of fantasy that comes at the expense of real material environmental engagements. Furthermore, when considering how these material environments are increasingly disturbed by environmental issues, is it ethical to ignore these and continue with this emphasis on wonder? This paper asserts the need for a different theoretical approach to wonder that can inform a literary style with which to respond to environmental issues. In its capacity to make things strange, metaphorical language leads this investigation. Turning to Adam Dickinson, ecocritic and poet, helps to draw out metaphor’s relevance by showing how the device affords an ‘is/is not’ dynamic. This paper takes this dynamic, suited to perceiving material entities with an ethical uncertainty, and shows its significant applicability to Morton’s articulation of climate change in Hyperobjects. Morton’s discussion of the imperceptible entity of climate change and its multiple guises is relevant to considering how metaphor’s ‘is/is not’ dynamic does not only apply to real material engagements but to engagements of real but simultaneously immaterial environmental issues. In contextualizing wonder in terms of perceptual uncertainty and material/immaterial shape-shifting, this paper shows how a literary style based on metaphor is apt to foster creative connection to environmental change.

Haiku and the weatherworld: scientific, embodied and cultural ways of knowing the weather Arran Stibbe (University of Gloucestershire)

This is a paper about the weather, or in Ingold’s terms, the weatherworld, since the weather cannot be considered as something separate from the trees whose branches bend in the wind or people raising their umbrellas against the rain. It will discuss ways of knowing the weather - scientific, embodied and, most importantly, cultural, and consider how these ways can draw us closer into the weatherworld or distance us from it. Against the background of the cultural schemas which help strangers bond (‘miserable day, isn’t it!’), travel advertisements which implore us to escape to the sun, and scientific descriptions of autonomous weather processes, this paper will turn to Japanese haiku. The question explored is whether classical haiku express different cultural schemas from those which are dominant in the UK, and whether they promote an embodied way of knowing the weather that goes beyond culture. Under consideration are the poems of classical haiku poets including Basho, Shiki, Buson, Chora, and Otsuni, with a special focus on Issa. The findings show some overlap with dominant UK schemas, but some key differences as well, particularly in terms of the detailed description and positive regard for a far wider range of weathers. The Japanese poems use various linguistic techniques to depict embodied engagement in the weatherworld, where weather becomes a way of creating bonds not just with other humans but also other animals, plants and the physical environment.

C2 Presenter Biographies

Núria Mina Riera holds a BA degree in English Philology and a Master’s Degree on Teaching English at Secondary School Level, both of them from the University of Lleida (Spain). Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate of contemporary Canadian poetry and an assistant lecturer at the same university. Her dissertation analyses the process of formation of “the late style” in Lorna Crozier’s works from an interdisciplinary approach of aging and ecocritical studies. As a lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics, she teaches English language in the Teacher-Training programme for future English teachers, and English poetry, 19th and 20th century history of the United Kingdom and Canadian and Australian culture to English-Studies undergraduates.

Isabel Galleymore

Arran Stibbe

C3: Entomological thinking and writing

Tragicomic Materialism around the Beehive in Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy Koichiro Ito (Independent Scholar)

In recent years, material ecocriticism has become increasingly prevalent in literary and environmental studies. Insects and objects have begun to receive more critical attention. For example, Catriona Sandilands argues that beekeeping can produce rich stories in terms of interspecies intimacy and reciprocity (2014). In Humble Boy (2001), English dramatist Charlotte Jones presents a striking relationship between bees and humans mixed with elements of tragicomedy. Drawing upon Richard Dutton’s notion of tragicomedy as well as Sandilands’ and Karen Barad’s insights into nonhuman and posthumanist performativity, I will explore the intersection between tragicomedy and material ecocriticism, and reveal how and why the bees take charge of the human characters’ fate and love affairs. In the play, James Humble, a biologist and a beekeeper, is enthusiastic about bees and their beehive partly because he regards a beehive as “the blueprint for a Utopia.” Apparently, taking care of bees and their beehive is more important to him than his wife Flora’s flirting with their neighbor George. Although James is killed by bees, his long-term relationship with bees affects the family’s life even after his death. His obsession with bees leads Flora, who once frequently cheated on her husband with George to come back to her late husband, psychologically. On the other hand, disoriented Flora, who reviles the geography of middle- England with its middle-class and rural setting, pursues her biological and social identity in flowers rather than the queen bee in the hive. Furthermore, I will investigate the biopolitics of bees and a beehive that contributes to the form of tragicomedy in Humble Boy.

Bee-ing Human Niamh Downing (Falmouth University)

Early visual and textual culture documents the longstanding interdependency between humans and bees.17 Bees continue to offer a potent image of connectedness in an age where ecological threat to their survival resonates with human fears about our own. Nevertheless, the use of bees, as both labouring species and metaphor for human concerns,

17 See Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 163, on stone bas-relief figures in Egypt dating from 2400 BC, and apian metaphor in Virgil. tends to obscure their agency. A renewed interest in beekeeping, particularly in non- traditional contexts such as the urban, has led to research in the arts, humanities and social sciences that seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between bees and human beings from a less anthropocentric perspective. Adopting a ‘multi-species ethnographic’ approach,18 such work demonstrates the importance of rethinking the dynamic, mutually constitutive, but uneven relationship between bees and humans.19 Bees and beekeeping are also popular subjects of non-fiction prose (Dave Goulson, A Sting in the Tale), film (Markus Imhoof, More than Honey), artistic design practice (Aganetha Dyck, ‘Guest Workers’) and poetry (Sean Borodale, Bee Journal), in part due to pressing environmental crisis. Borodale’s own beekeeping experiences are for example, re-codified as a poetic intervention in current discourses of ecological change and multispecies thinking. This paper explores such texts as part of a continually growing corpus of knowledge about beekeeping and bee-human relations, considering in what ways they might suggest a kind of relational knowledge – produced, codified, and transmitted at the complex interface between species – rather than solely by one species (humans) about another (bees).

Microscopic Knowledge in Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth and Robert Musil’s Das Fliegenpapier Simone Schröder (University of Bath)

Virginia Woolf’s nature essay The Death of the Moth (1942) and Robert Musil’s prose sketch Das Fliegenpapier (1914) both present their readers with close-ups of insects: Woolf observes a dying moth she encounters on her windowsill; Musil depicts the struggle of a fly that got stuck on a piece of flypaper. Both texts so far have often been discussed as allegorical representations of the human struggle with mortality against an autobiographical background. Whereas Musil’s essay seems to anticipate the horrors of the European trench war, Woolf’s text was read in the light of her own death. Although mortality is undeniably an important issue, captured in an imagery that draws on the lexical fields of war and death, it does not explain the great detail and microscopic focus which informs the animal depictions in both texts. In my talk, I will propose a reading that takes the fact serious that animals feature prominently in the title, suggesting that The Death of the Moth and Das Fliegenpapier are in as much about insects as they are about human-related is-sues. Following Heinz Drügh who revealed that Musil’s Modernist take on microscopic perspec- tives helped to discover a previously unknown organ on the fly’s body, I will argue that essayistic writing comes with its own unique epistemological potential. In keeping with Lawrence Buell’s observation that nature writing is determined by a dual accountability to the world of scientific facts and to literary imagination, I will discuss the ways in which zoological knowledge, poetic expression, and human meaning are interwoven in those texts.

C3 Presenter Biographies

Koichiro Ito

18 S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.’ Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-76 (545). 19 Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut, ‘Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intraspecies mindfulness’ Ethnography (2014); Jake Kosek, ‘Ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.’ Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650-78; Catriona Sandilands, ‘Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees’ in Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014).

Niamh Downing is Senior Lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She completed her PhD at University of Exeter in 2013 on the subject of archaeological poetics in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She is currently a Co-I on a newly-funded AHRC Connected Communities development project ‘Telling the Bees’, which draws on models of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), ecocritical perspectives, and design practice, to critically investigate cultural representations of bee-human relationships in folklore, literature and oral traditions.

Simone Schröder Simone Schröder read comparative literature, political science and Romance philology at the University of Mainz where she completed an M.A. Since 2014, Simone has been a PhD candidate at the University of Bath, working on an ecocritical thesis about the poetic and epistemological function of the nature essay. Her research is funded by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation. She has published articles on Francesco Petrarca, Jack Kerouac, Hans Keilson, W.G. Sebald and Peter Handke.

C4: Post War British and American Natural Histories

A Nuclear Nature? : Reconsidering the relationship between “Nature” and the Nuclear in Cold War American Literature and Science Sarah Daw (University of Exeter)

The paper focuses on the relationship between the thought and work of the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church and the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Church and Oppenheimer were both residents of Los Alamos, and were also correspondents. This paper demonstrates that the poetry of Church and the philosophical reflections of Oppenheimer reveal comparable, ecocentric conceptions of the relationship between the nuclear and the nonhuman world: Church and Oppenheimer conceive of scientific knowledge – and specifically nuclear development - as a ‘part of’ a greater nonhuman world, rather than understanding them as evidence that the human had surpassed or conquered “Nature”. Based on archival research conducted in New Mexico, this paper demonstrates that leading writers and scientists conceived of the nonhuman world as a ‘greater whole’, within which the human race – in spite of its newfound nuclear capability – was but a small and insignificant part. This paper is taken from the thesis, ‘Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature’. It discovers the significant presence of ecocentric depictions of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world within literature from 1945, troubling the positioning of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. In interrogating the influences behind literary depictions of the nonhuman world, this work also uncovers the profound and shaping influences of non-Western and non-Anglocentric spiritual and philosophical doctrines on American literary and scientific understandings of “Nature”.

How did the English countryside turn into the environment? Nature writing 1960-1980 Terry Gifford (Bath Spa University)

Sometime between 1960 and 1980 the British ‘countryside’ metamorphosed into ‘the environment’. A post-war backward looking interest in literary ruralism came to be replaced by a more serious, scientific, sharply engaged mode of writing. A long timeline of British nature writers from Gilbert White to the New Nature Writers will be followed by a timeline of books and events in the period 1960-1980 that indicate a shift in British culture and its nature writers towards environmentalism. The urge for New Nature Writers such as Robert Macfarlane to connect with earlier writers has led to retrospective distortions of this period’s non-fiction prose literature. It will be argued that in the UK it was not Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that triggered the environmental movement here, but Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground (1980). The work of Derek Ratcliffe, for example, in connecting the decline in the peregrine population and toxic pesticides in the UK, published in 1963, which changed legislation here, has no reference to Carson’s writings. It will be argued that the pastoral nature writing of H. V. Morton in England (1975) and Kenneth Allsop’s In the Country (1972) can be contrasted with the balancing of cultural needs and scientific evidence in Mabey’s post-pastoral enquiry The Common Ground. Twelve features of Mabey’s book will be identified in arguing for it as fully engaged environmental nature writing that discusses values, aesthetics, land use practices and government policy. Woods had become woodlands and fields had become habitats; culturenature was now demanding environmental ethics.

Coal narratives in recent British cinema David Ingram (Brunel University)

The films made by the National Coal Board Film Unit from 1947 to 1984, released on the British Film Institute’s DVD Portrait of a Miner (2009), may be seen as what David Nye calls ‘energy narratives’, constructing a cornucopian narrative of coal as an apparently limitless energy resource. The last film in the collection, 40 Years On (1978), ended with the triumphal claim that ‘we shall continue to win our essential energy from under the earth, not only for the next 40 years, but for the next 400’. The NCB films communicated this optimistic view of progress through images of a ‘technological sublime’: powerful machines allied with managerial expertise. In Greening the Media (2012), Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller argue that such celebrations of the ‘technological sublime’ are an important means by which media culture promotes an uncritical technophilia which masks the damaging environmental consequences of unsustainable technological change. 2014 saw the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the miner’s strike of 1984-5. In the intervening years, an environmentalist agenda about the contribution of burning fossil fuels to environmental pollution and climate change has emerged to augment earlier issues around health and safety. Do recent retrospective narratives about the strike, including those of popular cinema, reflect these discursive changes? Many commemorations have revived familiar Left narratives of workers’ solidarity, threatened community and the dignity of manual labour. But do films about mining and the miner’s strike frame ‘Thatcherism’ as environmental history?

C4 Presenter Biographies

Sarah Daw

Terry Gifford Terry Gifford is Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Writing and Environment, Bath Spa University and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante. He is the author of Ted Hughes (2009), Reconnecting With John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (2006), The Joy of Climbing (2004), Pastoral (1999), Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (2011 [1995]), editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011) and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Environment (2014). A second edition of Pastoral is forthcoming.

David Ingram

C5: Utterance disruptions and conflicting knowledge in environmental narratives

Imago mundi’s statistical hybris: the mythology of environmental data Bertrand Guest (CERIEC)

At the crossroad of ecological and digital humanities, I would like to question the relevance of data patterns as a way of knowing and of solving environmental issues, considering several problems such as the growing ecological impact of a so called immaterial economy (data-centers, transfer conditions), but also the very specific and sometimes socially unequal use which is made of them, when knowledge becomes a product for commercial and advertising applications or is utilized by insurance services which do not always compensate poor inhabitants for the loss of their home (cf. Katrina). In this contribution, I will therefore discuss the relevance of environmental data as a language from a literary perspective, analyzing the epistemological and political ambiguity which characterizes signs given as scientific and unambiguous facts, though they are often blended in unclear statements and hard to read texts. While using such data, who is then doing what, to whom, and above all with which words? Is the claimed protection of the Earth not a mere mode of social and territorial control? As far as data still requires a reader, which part does there remain for interpretative work, when languages are built which could let us think the world speaks on its own? Even without tackling the ontological question of whether we can still distinguish the world from its image. I would like to emphasize the epistemological issue raised by the new division of labour, in which collection on the field hardly remains a method and is often replaced by satellite observation. I will conclude by discussing the kind of critical reading required, especially when it comes to environment, by data systems’ peculiar kind of storytelling.

Demoiselles at War – or the Insurrection of the Third Language – Clara Breteau (University of Leeds)

The year 1829 saw the start of one of the eeriest peasant revolts in French modern history, « the Demoiselles’ war », a mountain guerilla aimed at earning back ancestral land rights, waged by peasants dressed up as women and characterized by the deployment of a fantastic and poetical language across the landscape. Whilst with the new Forest Code the local peasants community are bound to disband, the Demoiselles conjure up their programmed disappearance by invading the forest with a language of signs, marking a shift from habitation to haunting. This ecological crisis of a community expelled from its land is also at the same time a discursive crisis with the Demoiselles provocatively refusing to communicate by the State standards and « codes ». While this rebellion is too often approached in terms of « folklore » or « carnival » by academics or activists whom it inspires, we will here suggest another reading of this episode and protest form, leaning primarily on the outstanding film the director Jacques Nichet devoted to it in 1983, which concentrated on recreating the Demoiselles’ eerie presence and fantastic sign dialect. We will argue that the idiosyncratic and untamed « Third Language » they develop echoes the knowledge of the mountain as a « Third Landscape » (Clément, 2004), this discarded and unruly portion of the land they used to inhabit, while epitomizing the magical world structuring theorized by Gilbert Simondon (Simondon, 1958). We will finally look at the Demoiselles’ Existential Territory in Guattari’s ecosophical terms (Guattari, 1989) and will review the questions such a Third Landscape raises in the light of contemporary ecological fights and the various knowledge forms they mobilize.

On illness - Approaching speech impediments about nature via the difficulties of illness- related discourse Nathalie Blanc (National Center for Scientific Research - CNRS)

When finding out about a disease, the supposedly deep, analytical and accurate nature of the « dia-gnosis » (literally « deep, discriminating knowledge ») does not make it less of a challenge and a struggle for human beings to spell it out and make sense out of it. Indeed, just as much as nature is considered external, not only to humanity but also to history, we tend to relate to diseases in a way that position them as part of the nature that takes its meaning outside of us human beings, and whose fluctuations do not make sense. How can we therefore understand, describe, build knowledge about diseases ? To what extent do these – driving the parallel with nature further - raise the challenge of inventing new knowledge forms? Could the current ecological collapse be fruitfully approached as another « disease » that we fail to make sense of ? This contribution will present the proceedings of an ongoing investigation and research program about diseases, their articulation to the concept of nature and how limited the knowledge, languages and vocabularies we develop around them both can be. The intervention will address the lack of odes to illness and of books written in languages that could invent and re-create nature’senseless fluctuations. It highlights the invention of pain diagnosis, with specific ladders and vocabulary. It questions what happens on blogs & forums. It discusses this rarity that we have in common, that is to speak of the human condition and breach the loneliness of a sensitivity that has no words to be said.

C5 Presenter Biographies

Bertrand Guest (CERIEC) works as an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the Université d’Angers. A former student of the ENS in Lyon and Université Montaigne in Bordeaux, he wrote his Phd on the question of cosmological writings and revolutionary politics in the 19th century, reading Humboldt, Thoreau and Reclus. He is a member of the journal Essais in Bordeaux, takes part in interdisciplinary research programs such as “Ecologie et Humanités” in Bordeaux and “Eco Litt” in Angers and works on the connections between sciences, literature and politics in French, German and English-speaking literatures. He took part in several conferences among which “Performing Vegetal” (with Jean-Pierre Renou, Director of the IRHS, Research Institute for Horticulture and Seeds) and “What is Fiction Capable of Against the Environmental Crisis?” (with Emilie Hache, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Université Paris X Nanterre) and wrote several articles on politics, romanticism, ecology and anarchy.

Clara Breteau is an AHRC-Whiterose doctoral researcher at the University of Leeds in the French department, with degrees from ESSEC, La Sorbonne and Cambridge as well as with permaculture training. Her POEM research – Poiesis in the Era of Metamorphosis - focuses on theorizing the extra-literary poetics at play in autonomous alternative habitation forms, with the larger aim to contribute to an ecocritical recasting and reenchantment of ecological stakes. She publishes regularly in alternative ecological journals and has also created a radio broadcast working out the link between poetry and ecology, Poems for the Time Being. In 2015, she will present among others in Helsinki, Finland, at the Culture(s) in Sustainable Futures international conference and in Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL), Belgium, at the 2nd Interdisciplinary Symposium on Sustainable Development.

Nathalie Blanc works as a Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is the Managing Director of the CNRS-related LADYSS laboratory and is based in University Paris Diderot 7 in the Geography, History & Social Sciences Department. She has published various books and coordinated research programs on nature in the city, habitability, environmental aesthetics, literature & environment, among which : Vers une esthétique environnementale/Towards environmental aesthetics, Quae, 2008; Nouvelles esthétiques urbaines/New urban aesthetics, Colin, 2012, Aesthetics and public space/Esthétique et espace public” published with J. Lolive in Cosmopolitiques, “Litterature and ecology”. “Vers une écopoétique/Towards eco-poetry” published jointly with T. Pughe and D. Chartier, in Écologie et politique; “Ecoplasties. Art et environnement/ Ecoplasties. Art and Environment” with Julie Ramos, 2010, Manuella. She is currently working on the book Form, art, and environment: engaging in sustainability, to be published by Routledge in 2015. Since 2011, she has been the French delegate of the European research project Investigating cultural sustainability involving 14 countries. She is also an artist and an art commissionner, currently working on the theme of ecological fragility.

C6: STORIES OF CHANGE 3: Imagining Energy

Animal, vegetable, mineral: the energy systems of our imagined futures Bradon Smith (University of Bath)

Solar energy narratives and the figure of the scientist Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool)

The technological capture of the Sun’s energy has for centuries functioned as a compelling symbol of humanity’s supposed dominion over the environment. To test the veracity of an identifiable ‘solar energy narrative’ and outline some of its possible characteristics, this paper will consider ways in which the harnessing of solar energy is represented, figuratively transformed, and structurally appropriated in two imaginative texts. Robert Heinlein’s short story ‘Let there be light’ (1940) and Charles Morgan’s play The Burning Glass (1954) contemplate Promethean scenarios in which the revealing of technological secrets by an individual scientist will give humanity access to sublime forms of solar power. One focus of the paper, therefore, will be the tropic value (both serious and ironic) of the lone, male, scientific ‘genius’. I will explore what some of the implications of this individualism might be for our readings of solar energy narratives more generally, and show how the scientific framing of these narratives functions structurally and stylistically. These narratives will be read not only within historically-specific contexts of science, technology and environment, but also in relation to a long, myth-laden tradition of historically-transcendent tropes associated with solar power. Whilst the recurring presence of Promethean and Archimedean motifs is perhaps not surprising, their inflections within different stories of solar technology (and across different genres) remind us of the complex fashioning of our responses to energy systems. Moreover, I will argue that solar energy, analogized as a kind of ‘object’, does not project a single discourse within narratives but operates heteroglossically, functioning as both a source of life and destruction; of sustainability and environmental catastrophe.

“This Country Called Sustainability”: Energy and Climate Change in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy Chris Pak

Anthropogenic climate change and the approach of the peak-oil moment has encouraged many to think about alternative energy regimes that would provide a solution to the threat of economic collapse. Frederik Lodewijk Polak argues in The Image of the Future (1973) that societies shape themselves partly through the utopian potential of the image of the future that they construct. Science fiction (sf) has portrayed a variety of images of the future, from post-apocalyptic narratives of decline, techno-utopian futures and ecotopian images of sustainable societies. These narratives explore many instances of sustainable and unsustainable practices, but issues of energy, oil, water and the extraction of other resources have been persistent themes. Sustainability science, future studies and sf engage in different ways and for different purposes in speculating about the future. Sf cannot offer predictions, but it can, as Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman claim, act as ‘a forerunner researching the cultural landscape around us and imagining the future relationship between energy and society that we need to strive toward’.* Kim Stanley Robinson has consistently imagined ecological futures that address the relationship between politics, society, and science, and has explored ideas related to the utopian potential of sustainability in the context of climate change and mitigation strategies such as terraforming, geoengineering and biotechnology. In his Science in the Capitol trilogy, he explores the relationship between science and policy in a near future scenario where extreme weather events – a consequence of a carbon based energy regime – realises the predicted effects of climate change. How does the Science in the Capitol trilogy identify and analyse the problems associated with addressing the climate crisis, what sustainable alternatives does it imagine and how does it account for failures to adequately institute new energy regimes?

* Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman. “The Rise of Energy Humanities: Breaking the Impasse”. University Affairs. 2014. .

C6 Presenter Biographies

Bradon Smith

Greg Lynall

Chris Pak - Chris Pak is the editor of the Science Fiction Research Association’s SFRA Review and a researcher on the Leverhulme funded corpus linguistics project, “ “‘People’, ‘Products’, ‘Pests’ and ‘Pets’: The Discursive Representation of Animals” (animaldiscourse.wordpress.com). He has published articles on terraforming in science fiction, sustainability, climate change and postnationalism. More information and links to published articles can be found at chrispak.wix.com/chrispak.

Panel Session D: Thursday 3rd September 9.00am-10.30am

D1: University of Essex ‘Wild Writing ‘ Panel

Rethinking our relationship with nature – the role of literature in raising awareness and changing attitudes Melinda Appleby (University of Essex) The relationship between humans and the non-human world has long been a subject of interest and analysis for environmental writers. Its contentiousness is captured and reflected in literature from across the centuries. Areas of debate include whether humans are part of, or apart from, a perceived “nature,” and whether there is any legitimacy to humankind’s stewardship of the non-human world. Ethics involves avoiding or minimalizing damage to others. While we depend on nature beyond our own species to sustain life, we also need to protect our own interests in order to survive. The problem lies in balancing human and other interests, in an anthropocene age. Literature explores and debates the relationship between humans and non-humans in ways that can be pivotal in changing attitudes. However, the viewpoints expressed by writers reflect the environmental circumstances, depth of knowledge and cultural norms that prevail at the time of writing. Drawing on works from the 1800s to 1900s and from Britain and America, this paper will compare approaches to the non-human world which treat it as a resource, a community and a source of spiritual refreshment. I will examine texts from five writers who in different ways demand a rethinking of our relationship with nature: John Burroughs, John Clare, Edward Thomas, Aldo Leopold & Henry David Thoreau. All the texts exemplify practical, emotional and philosophical responses to the non-human world while drawing attention to their own limitations.

“For ten winters I followed him”: obsession in J. A Baker’s The Peregrine and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk Miranda Cichy J. A. Baker’s 1967 The Peregrine (1967) is now recognised as a seminal text of modern nature writing, while Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) has redefined the genre. Ostensibly, both books have the same subject: human obsession with birds of prey. Yet while they are bound by this common theme, the origin and shape of these obsessions are quite different. Using the Baker archive at the University of Essex – featured in Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks (March 2015) – this paper analyses the author’s journals, private correspondence and the testimony of friends and acquaintances to explore how The Peregrine was borne not simply out of a love of birds, but also intense literary ambition. It contrasts this with the personal obsession closely detailed by Macdonald in her blend of biography, memoir and nature writing in H is for Hawk. The absence of Baker from his text has led to much speculation on his reasons for tracking his accipitrine subjects, with writers such as Mark Cocker concluding that The Peregrine was Baker’s emotional eulogy for the birds that were then rapidly declining in numbers. My archive research supports the argument that it was equally Baker’s understanding of the peregrine as an icon of extinction – and the literary weight that this would lend – that led him to choose it as his subject matter.

Heligoland: Wild Writing and the island Elaine Ewart (University of Essex)

How can we tell the stories that lie beneath the surfaces of landscape and of water? I explore this question with reference to my own work on the subject of Heligoland, in the new nature writing genre, which won second prize in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2015.

Heligoland, a small archipelago in the North Sea, has been a site of destruction and displacement during and after two world wars: the islands have suffered devastating acts of violence by the British military authorities and their population has undergone two forced evacuations. Heligoland has also been a locus of migration and connection, a stopping-over place for both birds and people, and a focal point for the exchange of cultural, artistic and scientific ideas.

I interrogate my own work of non-fiction, Heligoland: an ecology of exile, a creative analysis of my visit to the islands in June 2014. My work consciously responds to W.G. Sebald’s walking tour of the Suffolk coast in The Rings of Saturn (1999). I explore the ways in which the hidden narratives of a landscape destroyed by war, and then rebuilt, can be read, interpreted and represented. I engage with new nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie, whose pioneering ways of writing about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature experiment both with form and subject matter. I also use forms of investigation found in the rural psychogeographical tradition, where authors such as Sebald have explored how memory, particularly violent memory, is inscribed upon landscape.

D1 Presenter Biographies

Melinda Appleby

Miranda Cichy

Elaine Ewart

D2: If we could…

The Issue of Human-animal Distinction in Contemporary Chinese Animal Fiction (1990 onwards) Chen Hong (Shanghai Normal University)

Animal fiction in China from 1990 onwards began to deal with the human-animal relationship from wider and deeper perspectives than before. Whereas Chinese market economy brought about severe conflicts between economic development and environmental protection or animal protection in particular in many cases, extreme ways of mistreating animals and revenges animals take onto human beings become frequent subjects of many of the animal writings of the period. Writers also experimented on narratives to better explore the animal world or to test the authenticity of the borderline between human and animal. The authors of this paper choose five major contemporary writers who are thought to best represent good animal fiction produced between 1990 and 2010 in China. In examining their works, the authors focus on the issue of human-animal distinction because of the central and crucial place it occupies in our grasp of the human- animal relations, whether by way of philosophical thinking, scientific observation, or artistic and literary representation. A brief survey of important thoughts about human-animal distinction in Chinese and Western philosophies convinces the authors that it’s reasonable to set certain criteria for good animal writings, which when all met would create an ideal case in which animals are no longer separated from humans in any essential way while at the same time show characteristics peculiar both to their species and themselves as individuals. After a careful study of the texts by Zhang Wei, Ye Guangqin, Jiang Rong, Jia Pingwa and Guo Xuebo, the authors come to the observation that, all these writers have destabilized, to varying degrees, the boundary between humans and animals, and by doing so, they greatly challenge our anthropocentric view regarding non-human animals and encourage us to relate to them morally, responsibly, and equally.

Negotiating Anthropomorphism in Talking-Animal Stories Anja Höing (University of Osnabrueck)

Anthropomorphic animal representations, especially present in children’s animal stories, have always been a disputed topic. Literary criticism tends to disregard talking-animal stories as sentimental, but nonetheless they are well-established ways of transmitting green knowledge– or green prejudice? Proponents of talking-animal stories state that anthropomorphisms help us grasp a natural world otherwise inaccessible to our necessarily anthropocentric perception, while opponents see dangers in “the animal” becoming a metaphorical construct symbolizing human plights. Controversially, juxtaposing “the animal [hero]” against “the human [Other]”, might allow reading animal protagonists not as metaphorical of humans, but of, indeed, animals. Talking-animal stories further might raise awareness for issues such as habitat destruction and population displacement, but yet – targeted at children and thus generally ending happily – they might achieve the opposite effect, perpetuating the myth that animals will always cope. All these arguments, however, pre-suppose the existence of a clear-cut nature/culture- and animal/human boundary. Yet it is precisely these boundaries that talking-animal stories transgress and often expose as artificial dichotomies. Such discussions thus finally create another problematic artificial concept: “the anthropomorphic animal”. Applying Garrard’s differentiation between critical and crude anthropomorphism to the genre, I argue that depending on the way anthropomorphism is employed, talking-animal stories might both prove an asset to “knowing” the natural world or lead to “unknow” it. The genre can perpetuate anthropocentric myths as well as dismantle them. A critical awareness of the mechanism of anthropomorphism in talking-animal stories can thus immensely add to the wealth of Ecocritical thinking.

Ways of learning: Animal mediators of knowledge and liberation in The Wind on the Moon Karin Molander Danielsson (Mälardalen University)

Non-human animal characters in stories for children historically have a didactic purpose, often, as in fables, to expose the human through the behavior of the non-human (cf. Fudge 2002) or to advocate control of unwanted behavior (Rudd 2009). Sometimes, as in Kipling’s The Jungle Book, although the animal characters do not escape anthropomorphism, they teach the child character, and the reader, as much about the natural world, as about human life. Possibly inspired by The Jungle Book, and exhibiting even more interesting examples of non- human teachers, Eric Linklater’s The Wind on the Moon (1944), Carnegie medal winner and still in print, remains curiously neglected by scholars. Given its wartime publication, the novel’s celebration of freedom and its plot of a series of liberations of political prisoners, are not surprising. However, here the motif of human imprisonment is strongly connected to that of zoo-animals. Moreover, as the children liberate animals and other prisoners, they also unlock knowledge about nature, the lives of animals, and different ways of learning. The unfocused and irrelevant teachings of their governess are contrasted against the mindful and essential knowledge mediated by the puma and the falcon: how to see and listen, how to find your way, and how to value freedom. This paper discusses how The Wind on the Moon connects learning to the liberation of body and mind, and to the value of the teachings of nature and non-human animals.

D2 Presenter Biographies

Chen Hong

Anja Höing studied English and Biology at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. She obtained her B.A. in 2009, followed by a Master of Education (M. Ed.) in 2011, and is now employed as a research assistant at the institute of English and American Studies at the University of Osnabrück, where she is working on her PhD on religion and culture in English animal stories. Her main research interests lie in the fields of animals in literature, especially talking animal stories, representations of nature, ecosystems and environmentalism in literature, children’s literature, and interfaces between literature and the natural sciences. She presented first findings at the “Cosmopolitan Animals” conference organized by the University of Kent in 2012. In 2013 she contributed to the ASLE-affiliated postgraduate workshop “Environment, Literature, Culture” in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2014, she read a paper on the topic of “Snit’s a good Dog – Dogs’ Innate Duty in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs” at the“1st Global Conference: The Animal and Human Bond” by Inter- Disciplinary, held in Mansfield College, Oxford, and since published in Who’s Talking Now – Multispecies Relations from Human and Animals’ Point of View . She also presented her research at the University of Sheffield’s 2014 “Reading Animals” conference, where she read a paper on “Writing Animals: Culture Transmission in Talking Animal Stories”.

Karin Molander Danielsson is a senior lecturer in English at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden, where she teaches English and American literature, ecocriticism, and Academic writing. Her research interests include animal studies, ecocriticism, American literary naturalism and children’s literature.

D3: EcoPoetics

Writing and Reading Poetry: Possession, Listening and Ecology Garry MacKenzie (University of St Andrews)

This paper will take as its starting point Susan Stewart’s theory of ‘lyric possession’: that a poem’s formal construction isn’t merely a demonstration of technical mastery, but also a means for the poet to undergo a ‘submersion of will’. Poets can be led in surprising directions, Stewart argues, by the latent energies and histories of a particular form or metre. Therefore, ‘by acknowledging the ways in which we are spoken through, we are bound to hear more than we meant to say’. For ecocritics, this suggests that in a poem knowledge of the phenomenal world is not simply a set of environmental ideas communicated by the poet. Knowledge is also synthesised and contained, for example, in the poem’s aesthetic composition and linguistic ambiguities, and these factors make it different from other textual forms. Turning to one of Stewart’s own poems, ‘The Owl’, I will consider how listening, subjectivity and ambiguity are fundamental to perception of the non-human world and also to the creative acts of writing and reading poetry. I will draw on ecocritical theory including Jonathan Bate’s ecopoesis and Timothy Morton’s contention that ‘ecocriticism has overlooked the way in which all art – not just explicitly ecological art – hardwires the environment into its form’. I will suggest that ‘listening’ to form and language as a means of composition, as well as the more familiar model of listening as attentiveness to the natural world, might undermine the notion of a stable poetic statement open to hermeneutic ecocritical examination.

Green Knowledge in Baudelaire's "Brumes et pluies" Daniel Finch-Race (University of Cambridge)

Amid the hubbub of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's extensive restructuring of Paris, Charles Baudelaire crafted the provocative vignettes of Les Fleurs du mal. Following condemnation of the collection for obscenity two months after its release in 1857, Baudelaire resolved to revise the work. The second edition, issued in 1861, contained a new second section, the 'Tableaux parisiens', inspired by the chaotic circumstances of metropolitan life during the Second Empire. 'Brumes et pluies', the sixteenth piece in the new section, featured in the 1857 edition, and its relocation raises the stakes of the sonnet depicting a pair of meteorological phenomena that signal the transitional periods of the year. Peculiarities of versification (several caesurae are submerged; the majority of the rhymes are weak) augment the melancholy that pervades the narrator's apostrophe of the seasons, suggesting detachment from the non-human world. Framed by the assertion that the oblivion of winter is as enticing as a fleeting liaison with another human, the conclusion of the piece is imbued with a splenetic ambience due to the narrator's desperate attempt to find release from his urban torment (figured in terms of his soul taking flight in the manner of a raven). It will ultimately be demonstrated that 'Brumes et pluies' evokes an idiosyncratic kind of green knowledge arising from alternative forms of human-nature relations that become necessary in the latter half of the nineteenth century because of the difficulties involved in achieving unmitigated contact in an increasingly metrocentric world.

Poetic ecologies and the contemporary lyric Daniel Weston (University of Hull)

Lyric expression and ecological thinking are often thought to have a problematic relationship. Experimental landscape poetry commonly dispenses with the explicit presence of the lyric ‘I’ observing the world in the poem (even if its implicit influence is more difficult to eradicate). Much of the accompanying critical work is also censorious of the supposed anthropocentric tendencies of lyric form. Likewise, when textual ecology is considered – the shape of the poem on the page, the spatial and sonic relationship that its parts bear to one another – it is often found that a freer verse style reflects real-world ecologies better by escaping the artificial, cultural constructs of metered verse, and replacing them with more ‘natural’ free verse rhythms. However, these lines of thinking might not take advantage of the fullest sense of ‘ecology’. This paper argues that the continued presence of inherited (‘traditional’) poetic voicing and form has been overlooked. A number of poets are noticing the way in which they can be harnessed – adapted rather than slavishly adhered to – in creating poetic ecologies. In particular, I look at sonnets or sonnet-like forms in recent poems explicitly concerned with nature, place, and environment by Jo Shapcott, Jen Hadfield, and Kathleen Jamie. In light of the environmental concerns that these poets address, the ghost of metre to be found in their work might signal an uneasy relationship between human ‘cultural’ and non-human ‘natural’ actors in ecology. I aim to articulate the potentials of a reconstructed lyric that are sometimes neglected in critical discussion.

D3 Presenter Biographies

Ros Ambler-Alderman Rosalind Alderman is a PhD student at Southampton University. Her research explores the parallels between ecological and textual systems, with an emphasis on complexity and emergence. In particular, she has been focusing on work by the Language writers Lyn Hejinian and Joan Retallack and contemporary ecopoets Marcella Durand, Juliana Spahr and Jonathan Skinner, as well as British landscape poets such as Colin Simms.

Garry MacKenzie

Daniel Finch-Race is a Research Scholar at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. His work primarily pertains to versification and ecocriticism. His articles examine ecopoetic ruminations in Baudelaire's 'Je n'ai pas oublié' and 'La Servante au grand cœur' ('Green Letters', 2015), and ecosensitivity in Rimbaud's 'Comédie de la soif' ('Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment', 2015). He co-edited a special issue of 'Dix-Neuf' on ecopoetics (2015), to which he contributed an article on the alterity of nature in Verlaine's 'Ariettes oubliées'. He organised the first-ever conference on French ecocriticism (2015).

Daniel Weston is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Hull. His research focuses on literary representations of landscape, place, and environment, with particular emphasis on contemporary writing in a number of different forms (poetry, fiction, non-fiction). He is interested in interdisciplinary methodologies, and has worked to integrate literary studies and cultural geography. His newest work considers ecology and literary form. He has written several book chapters and articles have appeared in Cultural Geographies, Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies, Textual Practice, and are forthcoming in Contemporary Literature and C21 Literature.

D4: Ways of knowing place

Environmental Localism Rediscovered: Global Sense of Place in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Lenka Filipova

In light of the recent shift in ecocritical thought towards cosmopolitan and global system theories, the paper challenges the domination of the rhetoric of the global and the marginalisation of the local. It considers the significance of the broad and evasive notion of “place” in environmentalism, specifically with respect to wider socio-economic relations of particular places and the agency of the non-human. The rejection of the global and its seamless integration into the local, which has been manifested through various forms of “ethics of proximity” (Heise, 2008) in the environmental discourse, has until recently posed both conceptual and political difficulties. Yet, I argue that to some extent, environmental responsibilities and political action in times of global environmental crisis are still bound to particular places. The primary focus of the paper is on two novels – Helon Habila’s Oil on Water and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide – and their literary recreation of place. While making references to Doreen Massey’s “progressive sense of place”, Arran Gare’s theories of inchoate environmental narratives, and Paul Carter’s distinction between mimesis and methexis, the discussion shows that, without exhibiting signs of “echo-parochialism” (Nixon 2011), the novels provide a sense of the local as process. They offer an alternative ontology of place which accounts for both local and global social relations of place, opposes the categories of abstract calculation, and calls for new forms of ethical relationality: an ethics of entanglement which implies an understanding of culture and place as “something nature does” (Barad 2012).

“Somewhere very else”: exploring knowing and relationships with real and fantastic place through China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun Chris Hussey (University of Cambridge)

Place is essential in texts and in our lives: it is where the narrative occurs. Whilst many theories look to explain how we identify with and become attached to place, it becomes more complex when such places are intangible or unreachable. Children’s literature brims with fantastic places that have captured the imagination of countless people over the years, such as Hogwarts and Wonderland. However, I am moved to explore how readers respond to fantastic portrayals of real places, questioning how individuals can come to know and form a relationship with a place that they cannot visit, as well as understanding how this influences their relationship with real places also. Miéville’s Un Lun Dun (2007) offers a platform to explore this through representations of the city of London, and its counterpart UnLondon. This contemporary text challenges both the traditional quest narrative structure and wilfully plays with the limitless possibilities of fantasy. The intersection between real and fantastic portrayals of London invites exploration as to what this offers a reader of the text, especially in relation to the lived experience of children within London, engaging with how one may form such relationships and how this may influence their identity. Utilising ecocritical and geocritical theory to explore the construction of place within this text, as well as drawing from my empirical work on relationships with place, I hope to bring about a greater understanding of the ways in which notions of place-identity are formed in relation to texts and representations of place.

‘The Thing to be Known Grows with the Knowing’: Knowing Place in the Work of Nan Shepherd Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University)

This paper will discuss the work of the Scottish modernist writer, Nan Shepherd. Her novels and mountaineering memoir, The Living Mountain, are located in the recognisable locales of the Cairngorms mountain range, yet her landscapes are poised between the topologies of the known and charted and the mysterious: mutable, ever changing, and ultimately unknowable. Shepherd was a pioneer of regional modernist writing, which tapped into international innovations in literary representation of lived experience, whilst also drawing from a long and local tradition of ecological thinking in Scottish literature and culture. In her novels, Shepherd explores the dense web of connections made in rural communities between individuals, communities and the land, using modernist techniques for representing enactive minds in dialogue with their surroundings. Her writing explores the meaning of places to those who dwell in them, at the same time as it meditates on the notion of 'Being' and the ways in which we orientate ourselves in relation to the natural world, prefiguring phenomenological thought and late twentieth century critical understandings of deep ecology. This paper will contribute to the conference theme of ‘Ways of knowing: scientific, cultural, metaphysical, religious’, by considering how Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world—whilst emphatically never total and always flawed—is attempted through a rich nexus of interconnecting and conflicting ways of knowing: derived from Scottish literature and geography, rural culture and folk traditions, Zen Buddism and botany, and most importantly, lived experience, and the dedicated attunement of sense, imagination and intellect to the natural world.

D4 Presenter Biographies

Lenka Filipova is currently a PhD candidate and an assistant lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation examines the notion of place in environmental discourse, with a special focus on contemporary concepts and representations of place that do not resort to forms of local conservatism and that effectively negotiate the local and global socio-economic and environmental relations of particular places. Her research interests include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, theories of space and place, and travel writing from the 18th century onwards.

Chris Hussey came up study Education with English and Drama at the University of Cambridge in 2008, and enjoyed it so much that he wanted to continue collecting letters after his name, pursuing his research interests for as long as possible. After his undergraduate degree, he studied for a Primary PGCE and then for the Children’s Literature Master of Education, before embarking on his PhD journey. He currently balances part-time study with working for Early Education, a charity based in London, allowing him to indulge both his love of children’s literature and education at every possible opportunity.

Samantha Walton

D5: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Encounters

Songs and Voices: Understanding Birdlife in Eighteenth-century Ireland Lucy Collins (University College Dublin)

The eighteenth century was a period of sustained reflection on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Animal life had long been a subject for both literary and artistic representation in Ireland, but at this time—due to a complex intersection of ethical and scientific enquiries—poets and artists began to re-examine the unequal relationship between man and animal, and to consider its implications for issues of religious belief and social justice. The representation of birdlife would be a central preoccupation for these poets, allowing them to combine moral and philosophical questions with attention to the particularity of the Irish context. Through poetry, with its multiplicity of forms and voices, they sought to understand birds from the perspective of both thought and feeling, attending to the particularity of their physical appearance and habits, but also connecting with their imagined experiences. In this paper I will explore poems that seek to appeal to human identification with the suffering of birds by voicing this experience directly and consider poetry as a medium for stimulating understanding of the non-human world.

When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna Sayre Nelson Greenfield (University of Pittsburgh)

John Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777) complains of the staleness of natural descriptions in modern poetry and attempts to promote a closer attention in poets “to the real state of nature in their own country.” Aikin concludes, however, by suggesting that most productive of novelty in verse would be attention to “the polar and tropical parts of the globe,” and here “What infinite scope for new and striking description would an animal history of these countries afford to the poet who should be able to draw it from original sources!” This paper will study attempts at the end of the eighteenth century to incorporate exotic birds into British poetry, particularly those poems responding to the ornithological discoveries from the South Sea voyages, investing new birds with significance. Such an exercise proves difficult, at least until Coleridge’s albatross, precisely because these birds do not come pre-loaded with meanings that can be efficiently evoked within verse. Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook, which transforms materials from Cook’s journals into poetry, will form a particular focus, though the paper will look at poems, both famous and obscure, from the last quarter of the century.

Representing the Tambora Eruption of 1815 David Higgins

The April 1815 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora is the largest known eruption in history. The explosions were heard over 2,000 kilometres away. The huge amount of sulphur released into the atmosphere affected global climate patterns, leading to a drop in global temperature and extreme weather events in 1816. The immediate death toll from the explosion, the tidal wave, and local famine and disease is impossible to know, but one plausible estimate puts it at about 117,000 people across Sumbawa, Bali, and Lombok. This paper analyses the collection of eyewitness accounts of the eruption and its aftermath that were collected together under the auspices of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Governor of Java from 1811 to 1816. Scholars have tended to treat this text a straightforward source from which a narrative of the eruption and its effects can be constructed. However, it is in fact a complex heteroglossic production in which different perspectives and knowledges intertwine and compete. I will focus in particular on the tension between the imperialistic and bureaucratic metanarrative provided by Raffles and the text’s more localised accounts of the catastrophe. Although Raffles emphasises the sublime power of the eruption, he presents the document as a form of environmental knowledge that will ultimately support imperial power and control. In contrast, the individual accounts that make up the narrative often invoke confusion, legend, and ignorance.

D5 Presenter Biographies

Lucy Collins

Sayre Nelson Greenfield

David Higgins

Panel Session E: Thursday 3rd September: 12.45pm-2.15pm

E1: Cultivation, Cooking and Consumption

Knowing ‘People’s Food’: Localism, Rose Macaulay, and the Poetry of the Women’s Land Army Alicia Carroll (Auburn University)

Tasked with growing local food under duress during the Great War, writing members of the Women’s Land Army like poet Rose Macaulay leave a record of their own struggle to know the intersections between the local and the wider world. Officially framed as ‘replacements’ of local farmers, the Landswomen in Macaulay’s poems learn that they are to cultivate land long fallow due not to the war, but to the undercutting of local farming by cheap imports under a hundred years of laissez faire economics. Schooled in agricultural practices by a nation suddenly quite interested in its own agriculture, the speakers find themselves ‘placed’ in ‘local’ communities and farms where distinct ecologies challenge their centralized training. The women come to know the difference between what ‘should’ grow according to their training methods (such as spreading manure on chalk ‘like marmalade on bread’), but ‘won’t even then.’ They realize that in planting, they sometimes destroy a ‘swathe of People’s Food,’ an entity Macaulay sacralizes through initial capitals. Their presence moreover ensures that local men can fight and be fed while doing so. Indeed, exploring the paradox between growing both food and the war, Macaulay’s Landswoman narrators experience sudden disturbing epiphanies into the practice of growing local food itself. Their voices scrutinize the intersection of the here and there, finding both startlingly connected through food. In consumption-based environmentalists, localists often equate small-scale local food production with environmental action or the ethical. But this same discourse may disconnect us from the wider world. Eradicating the difference between fighting abroad and planting locally, Macaulay’s poems are a useful critique of the limits of localism, asking us to think across and through the intimacies of the local to the great scale of the global, to think through the ongoing traffic between here and there.

Gourmets' Ecology: The Ethics of Food Consumption in Ka-Shiang Liu's Men's Markets and Jewel Tsai's Book of Soil-Cultivation Roger Pan (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

Gourmets are perhaps buoyant figures who share unique eating experiences but tantalizingly attract our attention to enjoy the same dishes. Yet, with the alarming food crisis caused by climate changes and human exploitation, eating inordinately seems to be unethical to maintain the environment, where people need to live with other non-human beings. This essay proposes the ethics of food consumption by studying Ka-Shiang Liu’s Men’s Markets and Pearl Tsai’s Book of Soil-Cultivation. On the one hand, Liu is known for his keen observation of animals and their habitats. In Men’s Markets, he tries to pique readers’ interest to visit traditional markets, purchasing regional and seasonal food products to save energy of extra conveyance. On the other hand, Tsai also has a unique profile of flora writing and gastronomy. In Book of Soil-Cultivation, she shares her unique experiences of growing vegetables in her own yard, from which she can gather materials to cook daily meals. Both of them can be regarded as gourmets who use their writing to inhibit unnecessary consumption. To begin, the essay will first survey studies of food consumption and pinpoints the geographical specificity (Taiwan and Hong Kong indicated in both books) to argue the necessity of temperate consumption. The second and third section discusses Liu’s Men’s Markets and Tsai’s Book of Soil-Cultivation respectively. To conclude, I will emphasize Liu’s and Tsai’s endeavor to harmonize with the environment, one that I call “gourmets’ ecology.”

Knowledge about food in German Children Cookbooks Sabine Planka (University of Siegen)

Knowledge about nature is omnipresent in books for children. How nature develops, how it is destroyed by men and how it can be saved – fictional as well as non-fictional books for children handle with those topics. Against this background the lecture wants to show how German children cookbooks handle with knowledge about food. In its young history – the beginning of the German children cookbook can be fixed in the 1850s – food issues can be found from the beginning on: The earliest children cookbooks explain – besides the description of recipes and how to cook – how to keep the house and prepare the little girls in that case for their role in their own household when they are grown up. In that context and that historical period of time it is – for example – important to know how to stock up (perishable) food. In the development of German children cookbooks the handling of food changes: Food is merely connected to a healthy lifestyle. It is therefore necessary to convey knowledge for example about healthy food and its production, about how to live and eat healthily and so on. In the present this knowledge is combined with knowledge concerning sustainability (e.g. about environmental protection). The lecture wants to give primary a historical overview of the development of German children cookbooks focusing the explanations given about (appearance and production of / processing / stocking up) food. Within this overview the following aspects will be analyzed: What is it that is conveyed about food and why is it necessary to convey this knowledge? How is knowledge about food conveyed? How does this conveyance change?

E1 Presenter Biographies

Alicia Carroll

Roger Pan is currently a research assistant in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica (the highest academic institution in Taiwan, ROC). He received his MA from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. His primary interests focus on Cultural Studies, Postcolonialism, late 19th century British literature and Sinophone Studies. He fosters his thinking by studying anything related to food. He had several conference presentations: “New Jews in the Shadows of Chinatown: Space, Identity, and Problems of Assimilation in The Accidental Asian and Mona in the Promised Land” at NCCU in 2009 examines the interrelationship between Asian American and Chinese food. “Spicy Food, Sullen Mood: Exotic Food and the Foreign Trade in Vanity Fair” at UW-Madison in 2010 discusses the curry dish in the text and its political/social implication in 19th century. His next project aims at studying politics in concurrent Taiwanese food literature.

Sabine Planka was born in 1980, studied German Studies, Comparative Studies and Art History at the University of Siegen. M.A.-Thesis in 2005 about the James Bond-Title Sequences. Ph.D. in 2008 with a dissertation about oracles and divination in film. Fields of research and teaching: Literature and films for children and young adults, motifs in literature and film, film studies, Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton. Publications and lectures in the above named fields of research. Currently working on children cookbooks and artificial humanity in children’s literature. Forthcoming and last publications: "Women's Bodies in the James Bond Title Sequences", in: Funnell, Lisa (Ed.): For His Eyes Only? The Women of James Bond: Feminism and Feminity in the Bond Franchise. New York: Wallflower Press (Columbia University Press) 2015 (forthcoming); "Tim Burtons bunte (Unter-)Welten. Corpse Bride (2005) und Alice in Wonderland (2010)" [Tim Burton’s gaudy (under-)worlds.], in: Klenke, Pascal/Muth, Laura/Seibel, Klaudia/Simonis, Annette (Hgg.): Writing Worlds. Welten- und Raummodelle der Fantastik. Heidelberg: Winter 2014, S. 191-204; Die Zeitreise. Ein Motiv in Literatur und Film für Kinder und Jugendliche. [The motif of timetravelling in literature and film for children and young adults.] Ed. by Sabine Planka. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2014; “Ratatouille”, in: Kurwinkel, Tobias/Schmerheim, Philipp: Kinder- und Jugendfilmanalyse. Konstanz/München: UVK 2013, pp. 232-250; „Auf der Suche nach Identität. Eine Betrachtung des Klons in Sangu Mandannas Roman Lost Girl (2012)“ [The search for identity: A View on Sangu Mandanna’s The Lost Girl], in: interjuli, Nr. 02 (2013), pp. 41-56.

E2: Modernist Prose and Poetry

‘Vegetable Humanity’ and the ‘Northern Flower’ of Vorticism: Early Ecology and the Modernist Avant-Garde Christina Alt (University of St Andrews)

The first issue of the Vorticist magazine BLAST opens with the assertion, ‘We want to leave Nature and Men alone… We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists, or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism), and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art’. Yet Vorticism and other modernist avant-garde movements were more preoccupied with nature than this assertion would suggest. Vorticism shares with early ecology an interest in the relationship between environmental conditions and the forms of life – and art – that thrive under these conditions. It also shares with early ecology both a discourse that blends imagery of the organic and the mechanical and a preoccupation with bringing natural systems under human control. My paper will examine the rhetoric of writers associated with modernist avant- garde movements such as Vorticism alongside accounts of the work and aims of early ecology in order to demonstrate the ways in which scientific and aesthetic discourses echoed and amplified one another in the early twentieth century.

“I Feel Like a Wet Seed Wild in the Hot Blind Earth”: Fragmented Bodies and Trans corporeality in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying Lili Bos (University of Amsterdam)

This paper will seek out to bridge the gap between the representation of the human body and the representation of the environment in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying by putting Faulkner’s novel in light of Stacy Alaimo’s theory of transcorporeality. By doing so, this paper will argue that an as of yet still unexplored unity can be found in the fragmentation represented in this work, which has mostly been depicted as having a dividing, individualistic and alienating character. When looking at the representation of the environment in As I Lay Dying it becomes clear that fragmentation can also be a unifying force when looking through the lens of Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality. Especially important for this argument is the representation of dust in Faulkner’s novel, which can be seen to echo Alaimo’s ideas on trans-corporeality very clearly. Moreover, when looking more closely at Faulkner’s poetic use of language in the novel, the idea of transcorporeality can also be found echoed through simile and metaphor throughout the text. This paper will contribute to the ecocritical field because it will focus on environmental elements in Faulkner’s novel in order to offer a new and drastically different approach to understanding the fragmentation represented in the work. Consequently, it will also demonstrate how modern ecocritical theories, such as transcorporeality, can offer new and innovative angles from which to approach canonical works.

Native Ecosystems, Flora, and Fauna in James Joyce's Writing James Fairhall (DePaul University)

Most of Joyce’s narratives unfold against the backdrop of Dublin’s manmade structures and systems—what William Cronon calls “second nature” (Nature’s Metropolis). Urban second nature arises from and interacts with the phenomena of biological nature, and Dublin has always contained plenty of examples of this interrelationship, such as wildflowers on canal walls or the diverse bird species of North Bull Island. Joyce’s fiction is not much concerned with flowers or birds or wild, nonhuman nature. (If he had wished to re-create the botanical Dublin of June 16, 1904, he could have used Nathaniel Colgan’s timely 1904 catalog, Flora of the County Dublin.) Nevertheless, the crucial memory of Bloom and Molly’s youthful love is their tryst on the Hill of Howth among indigenous “wild ferns” (probably native bracken or lady ferns) and rhododendrons (a long-established exotic). In addition, Joyce wrote about Ireland’s bogs and its vanished oak forest ecosystems in his critical writings and in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Indigenous Irish birds figure in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as the Wake. Drawing on Colgan and the naturalist Robert Praeger, this paper will discuss what we know and don’t know about native Irish flora and fauna in Joyce’s work. I have published recent ecocritical articles on Joyce in the Joyce Studies Annual, the Irish Studies Review, and the collection Eco-Joyce (Cork University Press, 2014), with a forthcoming article in the James Joyce Quarterly.

Modernist Experimentation and Avant-Garde Poetics as a Means of Re-Enchantment with the Natural World in the Poetry of Edith Sitwell Elizabeth Harris (Manchester Metropolitan University)

In this paper I will argue that through linguistic and formal experimentation modernist poets created important new ways of representing human/nature relations following the disruptive experience of war and modernity. Focussing on the poetry of Edith Sitwell, my paper will propose that her avant-garde poetic experimentation with the sound, rhythm and texture of language created new and invigorating ways of representing the infinite patterns and systems of the natural world. In opposition to readings of her poetry as escapist or fantastical, I will argue that Sitwell’s use of poetic experimentation to replicate the sensual experience of early contact with the non-human world encouraged a re-enchantment with nature as a means of challenging the dissociative pressures of modernity. Focusing primarily on the poetry of the 1920s, my paper aims to show that experimentation in Sitwell’s work, as well as in modernist poetry generally, does not mark a rejection of nature writing, but an attempt to increase knowledge of the complexity and vitality of the natural world through the reinvigoration of form and language. Sitwell’s work then becomes an example of how poetry can be a means of achieving a greater understanding of the diversity and vitality of the natural world. It also poses the possibility that this re-enchantment with place can be translated into a deepened environmental consciousness and a strengthened commitment to environmental protection.

E2 Presenter Biographies

Christina Alt

Lili Bos

James Fairhall

Elizabeth Harris

E3: Green on Stage and Screen

Staging Environmental Irony: foregrounding background in early modern theatre Gwilym Jones (University of Westminster)

‘‘Tis bitter cold’, we are told at the start of Hamlet. ‘The day is hot’ we learn, in Romeo and Juliet’s Verona. We are to imagine Lear in a storm, and Touchstone sunbathing. We look up to the clouds in Hamlet, to the stars in Merchant of Venice. The audience of early modern theatre, in the open-air playhouses around London, are exhorted to imagine the environment, just as they are told to ‘think when we talk of horses that you see them’. But what happens if Hamlet is staged in a heatwave? Or Romeo and Juliet in a winter frost? In my book, Shakespeare’s Storms, I use the phrase ‘environmental irony’ to think about the dual-level environmental experience of the playhouse. Like the open-air setting for which John Cage wrote his silence, the audience is directed to attend to the environment and experience its presence, and its present-ness. The ironic experience of the environment in early modern theatre occurs whether the stage weather is closely aligned with, or thoroughly opposed to, the audience’s weather. Background is foregrounded: the audience is prompted to recognise the environment as mediated through language and gesture. This paper will explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries utilise this quality of early modern performance aesthetic. What does it tell us about our environmental discourse? What happens when characters contradict each other’s representation of the environment? And what are the implications for ecocritical thinking?

Political Ecology: Ecological Ideology and Apocalyptic Scenarios on Stage Zümre Gizem Yilmaz (Hacettepe University)

Throughout history, there has been a tendency to locate the source of “irrational fear” felt for the natural environments, especially after natural catastrophies have destroyed human habitats. Although human beings have always found ways to “control” the natural world, with claims of superiority over other beings, their attempts to control have been countered by the agency of nature and other beings. Denying the agential capacity of nonhuman beings, humans have relied on their discursive practices to solve the environmental problems they have encountered. Instead of disclosing the environmental findings and evidences, “authorities” with direct access to knowledge-producing bodies have, rather, chosen to ignore them so as not to lose their political and economic power. Nonetheless, when nature strikes back, they themselves canalise all their wealth to change the situation for their own sake within an anthropocentric perspective. This situation is deeply illustrated in most of contemporary plays, two of which are The Contingency Plan (2009) by Steve Waters and Earthquakes in London (2010) by Mike Bartlett. These plays play a significant role in raising an ecological consciousness by erasing the anthropocentric point of view, and by acknowledging the intrinsic value of all the beings and nature itself. The apocalyptic scenarios, in these two plays, challenge the audience into realising the dethronement of the “human” from its privileged place among other beings while representing a self-developing nature without human intervention.

Gezai theatre, Shakespeare theatre, and the global warnings Iris Ralph (Tamkang University)

This paper ecocritically situates Shakespeare in local as well as presentist East Asian contexts. Drawing on a “presentist” argument by Sharon O’Dair and a “localist” argument by Bi-qi Beatrice Lei and Ching-Hsi Perng, the author ecocritically analyses three films: Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix (龍飛鳳舞) (2012), directed by Yu-lin Wang (王育麟); Shakespeare in Love (1998), directed by John Madden; and Romeo and Juliet (1996), directed by Baz Luhrmann. Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix, analogous to the main events of Shakespeare in Love, follows a gezai theater troupe’s efforts to remain financially solvent. In addition, the film depicts the Tien Lung theater troupe’s struggle with adverse weather conditions that associate with global warming and air pollution from local industries. In elaborating on this content, Ralph comments on the opening scene in the film of a typhoon that closes down a gezai performance and on later scenes of the industrial city of Kaohsiung, the largest industrial city in Taiwan where much of the action of the film takes place. Small scale, community organized, local gezai theater is commonly performed out of doors in Kaohsiung and in other heavily industrialized cities in Taiwan, but as unruly weather has become more intense and frequent and as air pollution has increased, gezai theater has lost audiences or moved indoors, catering to middleclass audiences who are reluctant to patronize the smaller, older, and traditional outdoor venues. Ralph ties these concerns as they are represented in Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix to Shakespeare in Love, which follows the staging of Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet in London at the turn of the sixteenth century, and to Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, staged against the backdrop of the car and carbon culture of modern urban Los Angeles.

Presenter Biographies

Gwilym Jones

Zümre Gizem Yilmaz obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2010, and her master’s degree in 2012 at Hacettepe University, in the Department of English Language and Literature. She is currently studying on her PhD dissertation, analysing the harmonious and discordant intermeshments of the cosmic elements in Renaissance English drama in the light of the theory of ecophobia. Her recent publications include an article “New Materialisms on Stage: Environmental Directions in Contemporary British Drama” and a book chapter entitled “Who is Afraid of the ‘Dark’? Familiarising the Unknown.”

Iris Ralph is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Tamkang University in Taiwan. Dr Ralph previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin (USA), Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (Australia), and Victoria University (Australia). Her areas of specialty are animal studies and ecocriticism. Her journal articles have been published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Purdue University, Indiana, USA), Journal of Ecocriticism (University of Northern British Columbia, Canada), Journal of Poyang Lake (Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences, Jiangxi, China), NTU Studies in Language and Literature (National Taiwan University), and Concentric (National Taiwan Normal University). Dr Ralph’s most recent publication is a book chapter in a critical collection of essays on Ted Hughes (Ted Hughes) edited by Terry Gifford (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

E4: Cultural Economies of Waste

Spectacular Trash: Contemporary Remediations of Global Urban Waste Sarah Harrison (University of Wisconsin)

As cities around the world grow at a seemingly unprecedented rate, so too do the varied forms of waste that global urbanization produces—not only unwanted objects, but also environmental toxins, defunct buildings and, crucially, the numbers of impoverished urban inhabitants who are reduced to the same status as the detritus with which they live and work. If, in Mary Douglas’ well-known formulation, dirt is “matter out of place”, the response of many urban stakeholders has been to put waste out of sight and out of mind where possible. Although material ubiquity increasingly renders this logic untenable, political invisibility still serves to perpetuate the marginalization of many cities’ poorest residents. This paper examines two artistic projects that disrupt the willful ignorance of urban waste through their innovative “remediations” of discarded things, degraded spaces and devalued people. Both a corrective and creative process, the conversion of urban waste into visual and performance art productively defamiliarizes the uneven modes of waste production, disposal and management that underpin today’s problematic urban ecosystems. I assess both the utopian promise and potential limitations of the projects documented in the recent films Waste Land (2010)—an account of modern artist Vik Muniz’ transformation of Rio de Janeiro trash pickers and refuse into mixed-media portraits—and Trash Dance (2013)—— the story of American choreographer Allison Orr’s staging of a dance performance using the garbage workers and trucks of Austin, Texas. Of particular interest is how these displays of waste not only command a local audience for that which is deliberately “unseen”, but also the ways in which their visual afterlives describe and enact the globalized circulation of urban waste. In keeping with the conference theme of “green knowledge”, these works demand a better understanding of the unequal urban ecosystems in which waste circulates as material resource, unwanted by-product and desirable artifact.

Glean Thinking: Gleaning, Lean and the Gleanologic of Latest Capitalism Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck College, University of London)

This paper complicates redemptive concepts of gleaning in recent ecocritical and new materialist scholarship (Boscagli, 2014; Sandilands, 2011) in light of divergent current representations of gleaning practices. Beginning with Jamie Oliver’s feminised ‘kinky’ gleaning, at once countercultural and too easily appropriable (Fresh One Productions, 2015), the paper demonstrates how the term has recently gained currency in popular culture as part of Tayloristic and largely depoliticised debates on food waste reform, and suggests that these draw upon dominant ‘lean’ management ideologies, which aspire to eliminate all waste or ‘muda’. The paper presents a polemical genealogy of ‘lean thinking’ (Womack & Jones, 2003) in lean meat and its slaughterhouse technologies, and puts management theory into conversation with The Book of Ruth to consider gleaning as a mode of resistance to ‘lean thinking’. Finally, this paper proposes that today there is a pharmacology of gleaning, or, gleanologic, which typifies our ecological moment of capitalism: poised, as poison, between the increasing pervasiveness of ‘lean thinking’ in managerial strategy (Leadbeater, 2015), and a more curative challenge to carnism (Joy, 2011) that is radical insofar as carnism and capitalism are coarticulated (Shukin, 2009). In contrast to Boscagli’s optimistic conclusion, it suggests that gleaning as a method of gathering ‘green knowledge’ is pharmacologically troubling in lean times.

Salvage Ecology: Annie Ross's Forest One Deena Rymhs (University of British Colombia)

Annie Ross’ art installation Forest One re-casts normative notions of value by transforming the discards of consumer culture into a singular work of art. A 1956 Nash Metropolitan car woven in cedar and plastic, Forest One is a commentary on automotive cultures, waste, and the environments they create. (Ross salvaged the bark from an urban forest cut down for condo developments near Vancouver; she found the Metropolitan car abandoned on an Oregon farm.) Forest One remediates the violence of waste in its use of solely reclaimed material: cedar bark, plastic box strapping, thrift-shop castaways, and other landfill-destined materials re-cover the car along with woven insignia of plant and animal “spirits.” Ross’ reappraisal of discarded objects can be appreciated through recent examinations of ex- commodities and cultural economies of waste offered by Arjun Appadurai and Steven J. Jackson. My reading of Ross’ work draws on Appadurai’s and Jackson’s work next to Jane Bennett’s contributions to new materialism to explore the relationship between environmental and social violence and the connections between human and non-human life in Ross’ work. Blurring categories of animate/inanimate, organic/inorganic, subject/object, nature/culture, Ross’ art and writing propose a radically expansive ecology that illuminates human and non-human interdependencies and urges her audiences to see themselves in horizontal rather than vertical relationship to their environments. My discussion of Forest One will trace the affective and ethical connections among people, things, and their environments made manifest in this installation and the broader ontological implications of the ecology suggested in Ross’ work.

E5 Presenter Biographies

Sarah Harrison recently completed her PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin- Madison where her interdisciplinary research focused on postcolonial studies, transnational literature, ecocriticism and urban studies. She is currently completing my first monograph, Waste Matters: Urban Margins in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature, which examines how Anglophone and Francophone writers from the Caribbean, India, the US and Africa respond to the challenges of contemporary urbanization through their formal and thematic engagement with urban waste. Her other research interests include: contemporary reworkings of the “nature as healer” genre and the role of infrastructure as theme and form in global literature.

Natalie Joelle

Deena Ryhms

E6: Urban Spaces and City Stories

Place, Landscape and Memory in Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss Anurag Bhattacharyya (Dibrugarh University)

Soul Mountain (2000) is an autobiographical novel which offers a wonderful synthesis of place and landscape through the mythic geographic and the biocentric world. Gao's strange excursions allows him to ponder on the way the Cultural Revolution has swept away the vital interrelationship between the human and physical ecology as decisively as it has destroyed the ancient forests. Kiran Desai’s 2006 Man Booker Prize novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is a story set in the mid-1980s in Kalimpong a Himalayan town by the foot of Mount Kangchenjunga, and in New York City. Kiran Desai integrated her study of nature and the environment into fiction and embodied her ecological observations in her characters and settings. The paper intends to examine two texts from different geographical zones by two expatriate writers which have been successful in creating a mark in world literature have been selected. Chinese Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain (2000), is a predominantly introspective journey in the early 80s into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The paper seeks to bring out a better understanding of the intertwining aspects of place, landscape, memory and geography in ethnographic representation and its significance in both novels. In the twentieth century, China had experienced a period of amnesia, in which the nation’s rich past was erased from the collective memory of the Chinese. The paper examines how ethnological propensity, as shown in Soul Mountain and The Inheritance of Loss proves transgressive in several ways: defending buried minority cultures, which are the casualties of the ravages of dominant culture, protecting individual memory from established historiography, and finally, examining the dark areas of one’s personal past in order to become reconciled with oneself. The journey in both the novels traverse through the landscape which creates a dreamlike, meditative series of interrelated fragments, images that includes place as preserver of cultural memory, suppressed folk cultures, the recovery of childhood and spirituality, symbolized by the elusive Soul Mountain.

From Green to Brown Knowledge Landscapes: Re-rooting Urban Environmental Discourse from Metaphor to Matter Christopher Schliephake (University of Augsburg)

Early analysts of urban life in America like the Chicago School of Urban Sociology followed a decidedly metaphorical way of analyzing the complex interrelations between social groups, their institutions, and the larger urban environments in which they were located. In their concept, the urban constituted an “ecosystem”, governed by many of the same processes that could be found in nature. However, their aim was not so much to study ecological relationships but to understand urban systems, building on ecological analogies. Thereby, the Chicago School became a driving force behind the evolution of “human ecology” and, along with it, of the idea of collective adaption to environments as well as of the view of cities as contested habitats. In the last decades, however, the tide has changed. What had once functioned as a metaphorical way that helped in the production of knowledge, is now taken quite literally: Government think tanks as well as non-profit organizations like Terreform ONE embrace the idea of human-built environments as ecosystems, shifting the focus from the social interactions of urban life to their material fabrics. With big-budget undertakings like the construction of “eco-cities”, the raw matter of cities comes to the fore: Waste, sewage, greenhouse-gas emissions, building materials etc. “Urban ecology” has thus taken a new turn and has become a mode of knowledge production concerned with the material world and the question of how human habitats of the future have to be transformed in order to make them more sustainable. Against this background, I want to give a short overview of these theoretical developments and to bring recent urban ecological debates together with a new trend in the burgeoning field of ecocriticism, namely “material ecocriticism”. While I argue that “ecocriticism” can itself be seen as a specific mode of knowledge production that seeks to highlight interconnectedness and feedback relations between the human and the non-human world, I also want to show how the vibrant sub-strand of “material ecocriticism” challenges traditional dichotomies between “nature” and “culture”, “city” and “country”. With this theoretical model in mind, I will analyze the intersections between recent urban and environmental discourse and try to dissect the ways in which environmental knowledge production has become implicated in the planning of future worlds, where matter comes to matter – but where there is also the question of who will profit from this and who will be left behind.

In self-renewing chorus': Pynchon's thermodynamic Londons George Francis Bickers (University of York)

My paper is an examination of Thomas Pynchon's depiction of late- and post-war London in Gravity's Rainbow (1971), in particular the first section, 'Beyond the Zero'. Adopting the critical focus on entropy as it has been applied to Pynchon's depiction of the rocket in the novel, my paper instead refocuses this entropic exploration onto the figuration of London. Pushing against Richard Lehan's suggestion that 'the city is a closed system: nothing provides it energy outside itself' (1998), I make the claim that the city's exploitation of resources of energy did not cease once it had exploited the resources of its rural surroundings, but instead feeds on its people and, in the context of the novel, 'the War'. The paper examines a different perspective on energy consumption and utilisation. Outside of its immediate wartime context, Pynchon's London is endowed with a form of consciousness, unspeaking, but active and hungry. This 'City-Paranoiac', as labelled in the novel, is formed not only by its physicality but also by a idea of 'London'. Once London proper has exhausted its rural surroundings, the survival of the city relies on London proper becoming the sacrificial energy source for a vision of the city, a potential city, 'London'. In doing so, the perception of our relationship with energy changes, as the city (and not its people) becomes autophagic, the thing to be fed and maintained by the people and the infrastructure of those who constitute it, simultaneously self-sustaining and depletive.

E6 Presenter Biographies

Anurag Bhattacharyya teaches English Literature in the Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Assam (India). In 2013 he obtained his Ph.D. Degree from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) in the area of Ecocriticism. The thesis was titled “Places, Landscapes and Lives: Towards an Ecocritical Reading of Selected Fiction of Gao Xingjian”. His other research interest includes Environmental Literature, Place Studies, Indian Writing in English and Cultural and Postcolonial Studies. He has been constantly involved with the development in the field of ecocriticism and regularly publishes his research articles in International/National Journals. He attended many National and International Conferences in India as well as abroad as a participant.In October 2011 he was invited and offered a fellowship to deliver his lecture on Gao Xingjian, Chinese Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Christopher Schliephake

George Francis Bickers

Panel Session F: Friday 4th September 9.00am-10.30am

F1: Salvage and Survival

PostNatural Futures: Biocultural Onto-Epistemology in Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden Kerim Can Yazgünoglu (Hacettepe University)

It is due to the fundamental inextricability of culture and biology or culture and nature or bios and zoe that “biocultures” in the posthumanist thought question the politics of life itself, human and nonhuman life-forms, material and immaterial entities in line with the new understandings of new materialisms. In this regard, what emerges from today’s debate pertaining to various strands of posthumanism is that every material beings, human and nonhuman, has “vitality” in the sense that “things” has agency or capacity to affect and to be affected, depending on their “intra-actions” with other material-discursive practices. It is in relation to biocultural onto-epistemology that an internet site raises a question: “How to understand identity, personhood, individuality, community, and the political in the context of biochemical, neurobiological, genomic, technological information?” In this sense, drawing principally on theories of posthumanism, my aim is to explore not only ontology of material bodies with regard to new vitalism, but also epistemological implications of biocultures in Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989). With the impact of biotechnologies, genetic engineering, and biomedicine, for instance, viruses in the novel become biocultural actants transferring “knowledge” to people whose bodies are biologically readable. Suggesting that all material bodies as readable texts are counted as “vital entities” such as viruses, bacteria, several microorganisms, intra-acting within the phenomena, this biocultural thought might bring politics of epistemology into question

‘The Only Truly Alien Planet is Earth’—measuring ontology in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World Miriah Reynolds (Durham University)

This paper aims to ferment a theory of ontological becoming in one of J.G. Ballard’s ‘disaster quartet’ novels, The Drowned World (1962). Ballard’s biospheric disaster tale provides a rich site for the aestheticized thresholds that evade definitive critical models or theories. For Ballard, ‘inner space’ of the human mind becomes the new frontier in an outer world saturated with mass media fiction. However, the fiction is a catastrophic ecological real: a massive global warming event upends human understanding through a new brutalised perception. Evolution produces atavistic megafauna reminiscent of the late Triassic Period. Human birth rates decline and nightmarish psychic disturbances suggest movement towards an origin and originary point in anthropocentric history. I aim to explore concepts of world-making as a relationship in seating subjectivity and being critical to the functional Ballardian aesthetic. To do this, I put Ballard in dialogue with the Heideggerian event of Ereignis or how ‘appropriation appropriates’ in thinking the ground of being. I argue that we can read Ballard’s world catastrophe novels richly by using Heidegger to mark the space after catastrophe as a kind of excessive spatiality beyond the horizon of the event. In Ballard’s humans, this is met with Heideggerian Vorgang: the desperate attempt for scientist-figures in The Drowned World to objectify the genesis of the disaster through obsessiveness. I also will touch upon these thematic human desires through Derrida’s notion of the re-mark to analyse how the notion of alterity, which evades representation, might illuminate the opacity of knowing in Ballard’s prose.

The wilderness as a pivotal topos in David Almond and Dave McKean’s The Savage (2008) Hege Emma Rimmereide (Bergen University College)

The scope of this paper is to discuss how the concept of wilderness is represented in David Almond and Dave McKean’s The Savage (2009). The paper will discuss the dialectic relationship between nature and culture expressed in the dialogue between the image and the verbal text and between a cultivated and uncultivated verbal language. The paper will be a reading of The Savage and discuss three perspectives on the notion of wilderness: from the point of view of ecocriticism; Almond’s own view on wilderness; and finally, discuss the nature/culture boundary from the point of view of the ancient figure of Virgil’s wheel. These perspectives will challenge the notion of nature and culture and discuss how the verbal and visual representations of nature found in children’s literature shape children’s local and global environmental awareness when expressed in written and oral texts. The research is part of a research project on Nature in Children’s Literature (NaChiLit).20 The main objective of the NaChiLit research project is to challenge the various ways in which nature is understood within the field of children’s literature.

F1 Presenter Biographies

Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu is currently Research Assistant and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University-Ankara, Turkey. He obtained his Master’s Degree in English Literature from Hacettepe University, Turkey in 2012, with his Master’s thesis, titled “Corporeal and Trans-Corporeal Reflections in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.” His areas of interest include 21st Century British Novel, the Body in English Literature and Culture, Feminist and Queer Fiction, Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, Environmental Pollution in British Novel. He is conducting research on “postnatures” and waste studies in 21st –century British novel for his Ph.D. dissertation.

Miriah Reynolds

Hege Emma Rimmereide is a Lecturer at Bergen University College. Her most recent publications are “Graphic Novels in EFL learning” (2013) and “Using picturebooks and illustrated books in autonomous learning to improve L2 writing among 11-year olds” (2013) published in The Language Learning Journal. She teaches literature in teacher education.

F2: The Alchemical Landscape

A panel and discussion session covering the work of the recently launched research project: The Alchemical Landscape. For more information on the project and to join the mailing list, please consult the project website: http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk

Yvonne Salmon (University of Cambridge, Project Director) The Alchemical Landscape

20 The research is part of a research project on Nature in Nature in Children’s literature at Bergen University College, Norway. An increasing number of writers, artists, musicians and film-makers are re-investing the landscape with esoteric and mythic imagery. From the revival of ‘Folk Horror’ to the cross-over between magical and artistic practice, this ‘enchanted’ representation of the rural works as both a link to the past and an articulation of pressing contemporary concerns.

This paper will briefly map the creative, aesthetic and political implications of this ‘geographic turn’.

Phil Legard, (Leeds Beckett University) The Bright Sound Behind the Sound: Real-World Music, Symbolic Discourse and the Foregrounding of Imagination This paper responds to a recent article by American sound artist Kim Cascone in which he asserts that the recent trend for the presentation of environmental recordings as ‘sonic art’ is crucially lacking in some form of ‘soul’ or vitality. Cascone suggests that it is the responsibility of an artist working with real-world sounds to enter a more imaginative engagement that precedents within the field (and within the wider field of sonic arts in general) have historically presented. The paper briefly explores historical impulse to deprecate the importance of imagination, along with the imaginative implications of discourse around what Norman calls ‘real-world music’. From here, we explore the relationship between imagination and sound in two pieces of sonic art and argue that one response to Cascone’s call for an imaginative turn can be found within the idea of the symbol as codified in Romantic and ‘traditional’ poetic discourse (after Kathleen Raine). The paper explores the way in which a cultivation of an ‘imaginative perception’ can be used to define, reveal or elucidate such symbols in a compositional context and relates the creative and interpretive use of ‘sound-symbols’ to both Voss’ methodology of the imagination (2009) and Thomas’ multidimensional spectrum of imagination (2014).

Presenter Biographies

Yvonne Salmon

Phil Legard

F3: Projects narrative, poetic and sculptural

Ways of Knowing Watersheds: Loren Eiseley's "Flow of the River" and the Platte Basin Timelapse Project Tom Lynch (University of Nebraska)

Theoretical conversations regarding place/space studies often revolve around the competing claims of lococentrism vs. a global perspective. In this paper I contend that this formulation is a false and unproductive dichotomy that should be resisted at every opportunity, and I offer the bioregional concept of watershed consciousness as a particularly apt and rigorously materialist venue in which to demonstrate a more wholistic perspective. Places and their distinctive features exist at a complexly graduated range of scales, revealing nested and interconnected characteristics from the smallest to the largest level. Few planetary landforms illustrate this more than watersheds and the larger hydrological cycle of which they are a part. Being fractals, watersheds can be envisioned at a nearly infinite range of telescoping and mutually constitutive scales. The movement of a water molecule through bodies, watersheds, and planets gives the lie to the local vs. global polarity. Yet knowing these facts in an imaginatively meaningful way can be challenging. Of the many traditions of environmental thought, bioregionalists have been at the forefront of attempting to generate what Gary Snyder first referred to as a "watershed consciousness." This paper examines two efforts to develop such a consciousness within the watershed of the Platte River in the interior of the North American continent. The first is Loren Eiseley's essay "The Flow of the River," published as the second chapter of The Immense Journey in 1957. In this essay Eiseley combines personal experience narratives with geological and evolutionary knowledge in order to generate a watershed consciousness involving the Platte River that spans vast scales of both time and place. I juxtapose Eiseley's essay with a quite different and newly emerging effort, the Platte Basin Timelapse project. This project, organized by photographers Mike Forsberg and Michael Farrell, was initiated in 2011. It has currently placed 40 timelapse cameras throughout the Platte Basin watershed, from Colorado's Lake Agnes at 11,000 feet on the continental divide down to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, at 900 feet elevation, where the Platte debouches into the Missouri River. Each of these cameras takes a photograph every 30 seconds, which are then combined into stunning visual displays of the changing characteristics of the river that are made publically available via the internet and public television. As planetary water resources face an increasing number of threats--from global climate change and alterations in rainfall patterns, to toxic pollution, to over-appropriation of irrigation waters and the drawdown of ancient aquifers, to the commodification of water by corporate interests--few would argue that we are not facing a planetary water crisis. To respond to that crisis, we are desperately in need of discovering ways to generate an ethically engaged watershed consciousness. In this paper I analyze these two projects as examples of ways of imaginatively and ethically knowing watersheds.

Poetic Field Research: Enchantment in the Mobile-Bay Watershed Heidi Staples (University of Alabama)

In The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett suggests engaging the “everyday marvels in order to uncover…the ethical potential of a mood of enchantment.” An epistemology of enchantment offers an affective engagement that produces deep attachment and thus regard, concern, care. I will discuss and share from MIDDENS, a work- in-progress that uses poetic field research excursions across ‘America’s Amazon’—the Mobile Bay Watershed in Alabama, the third most biodiverse area in the United States and my recently declared place on the planet—in order to locate the enchantment and engagement Bennett describes. This work includes poems written in response to a weekend at the Alabama Coastal Bird Festival; an afternoon touring Chem Waste Landfill, the largest hazardous waste site in the U.S. and a Certified Wildlife Habitat; and an afternoon at Prewitt Slave Cemetery. Multiple other excursions are planned for this summer, including a primitive camping experience along the Bartram Canoe Trail. Poetics, political theory, and ecofeminism will frame the reading of selected poems in a proposition stating that through actively seeking out wonder in a bioregion, poets can become enchanted, an experience that will “propel ethical generosity.”

Speaking wood: the world of materials in the sculpture of Alberto Carneiro and David Nash Daniela Kato (Hiroshima Jogakuin University)

Much has been written, in recent years, about the “new materialisms” in the environmental humanities. And much has been made of their potentially radical implications in terms of the challenge they pose to normative beliefs about human agency as well as to the ways in which human beings interact with the non-human. It is my contention, however, that for artists whose practices engage directly with nature and the landscape unfathomable concepts such as “materiality” and “agency” are of little import. What these artists engage and interact with is materials – their affordances, histories, and transformations. My paper aims to discuss the ecological implications of this artistic engagement with materials, by focusing on two contemporary European sculptors who have consistently made wood the core material of their art. I will take the creative practices of Alberto Carneiro (Coronado, Portugal, 1937) and David Nash (Surrey, UK, 1945) as examples of “knowledges-in-the-making” that deeply rethink and reintegrate art, life, nature and landscape. Underpinning my discussion will be the recent work of anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011, 2013), particularly his determination to dislodge materiality and agency from the centre of academic debate on material culture, and, following the lead of sentient practitioners, to restore a healthy concern with materials and with how artists grow their forms into existence. This bold move challenges a series of dichotomies that still lie at the heart of modern anthropocentric thought and whose dead hand the current theoretical emphasis on “materiality” has failed to remove: the division between the mental and the material, between the organic and the artefactual, and, ultimately, between nature and culture. It is my purpose to demonstrate the distinct ways in which the sculptural works of Carneiro and Nash dissolve such dichotomies and return artistic practice to the generative flux of life, by reminding us that “like other creatures, human beings do not exist on the ‘other side’ of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials” (Ingold 2011).

Presenter Biographies

Tom Lynch

Heidi Lynn Staples’ debut collection, Guess Can Gallop, was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is author of three other collections, including Noise Event (Ahsahta, 2013), and her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. With the poet Amy King, she is editor and founder of Poets for Living Waters, begun as an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, forthcoming from BlazeVOX. Currently, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she lives with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, and smartphone.

Daniela Kato

F4: Books of Nature: Reworking Pastoral

‘And be myself in memory once again’: cultural memory and ‘real’ knowledge in John Clare and Alice Oswald. Sue Edney (Bath Spa University)

In this paper, I will explore how knowledge and memory are explored in the work of two poets, John Clare and Alice Oswald, through their reworking of classical and traditional forms. In ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, for example, John Clare mimics the nightingale’s song, using onomatopoeia mingled with classical pastoral. By doing so he establishes a connection between the human and non-human voice, in the reality of his present moment and also in a cultural context of shared experience and memory, actual and literary. This was Clare’s ‘knowledge’; a blend of pragmatism, poetics and emotional instinct. Although poetic language can be restorative and compensatory, the attempt to re-situate materiality – the ‘real’ – in a narrative can disturb, foreground or marginalise other meanings. To make practical use of memory, in the form of past cultural, already-known and knowable poetics, transforms our ability to know and to re-evaluate past, present and future realities. It also allows poets to make personal knowledge public and vice versa. In Memorial, Alice Oswald ‘re-members’ Homer’s Iliad in order to restore its ‘bright unbearable reality’, not just a public, performed ‘oral cemetery’. In her re-creation of the biographies of the slain, Oswald allows for the possibility of material (bodily) reconstitution through classical and modern poetics. Clare and Oswald test the boundaries of the knowable in personal and collective cultural memory and examine how we are ‘situated to experience the real’ (Foucault) through the poetic use of cultural memory in the immediacy of the present moment.

Cabinets of Curiosity and the “Book of Nature”: Coleridge, Emerson, and Transatlantic Science Samantha Harvey (Boise State University)

This paper examines a central motif of transatlantic Romanticism: “the book of nature,” or the idea that the physical landscape can be “read” as a book of spiritual meaning or alternative scripture. Both S. T. Coleridge and R. W. Emerson had epiphanic experiences of reading the book of nature during their visits to natural history museums, including John Hunter’s cabinet of curiosities at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, otherwise known as the “Crystal Gallery.” Coleridge described the Hunterian museum as an “august temple” where “profound ideas concerning Life [are] presented to us in a more perfect language than that of words - the language of God himself, as uttered by Nature.” (“Theory of Life” 485-6) Similarly in the third volume of The Friend, which Emerson studied carefully, Coleridge referred to the Hunterian as revealing “the unspoken alphabet of nature.” (The Friend I 474) Emerson’s extensive reading in Coleridge primed him to interpret his visits to natural history museums in Europe (including the Hunterian, which he visited both in 1833 and 1848) as exercises in reading the book of nature. While Coleridge and Emerson similarly described nature as an “alphabet,” “transcript” and “cipher” for spirit, there were certain limits in place since the “text” of the book of nature was never perfectly readable. This paper will discuss how Coleridge’s emotive, intuitive, and imaginative approaches to science shaped Emerson’s essays on natural history.

‘green void […] up to the very door’: Colour and Food in J. H. Prynne’s Post-Pastoral Daniel Eltringham (Birkbeck College, University of London) (by skype)

This paper will offer a reading of J. H. Prynne’s High Pink on Chrome (1975), a neglected volume by a major late-modernist British poet and a complex post-pastoral of commodity transformations in which sheep subject to pastoral care and discipline become, in their final form, an occasion to ‘pass the mint sauce’, and ‘food is / money made easy’. Arguably Prynne’s first experiment with post-pastoral, High Pink describes, in a fractured register mediated by news speak, a rural tragedy in Iraq in 1971. Pink-dyed rice was imported from Mexico and eaten by Iraqi farmers, leading to widespread mercury poisoning. The rice’s garish colour, like the volume’s frontispiece, warns that in the global food market lethal harm can be microscopic, and synthetic colours can replace organic ones; green too is also supplanted from its talismanic position in ecocritical discourse and subject to suspicion about its status as emblematic of ‘nature’. Such hermeneutic wariness of colour is important to Prynne’s relationship with William Wordsworth, and specifically with ‘Tintern Abbey’, a poem of great significance for Prynne. ‘Hadstock was looking good the other day when we passed through – waves of green void lapping right up to the very door’, Prynne wrote to American poet Edward Dorn in 1976, his flippant mangling of Wordsworth’s ‘green to the very door’ hinting towards a deep engagement with, and qualification of, a Wordsworthian ecological epistemology in which, as Prynne writes elsewhere on ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘what is first wildly green is later how the green runs wild’.

F4 Presenter Biographies

Sue Edney

Samantha Harvey is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Boise State University. She is the author of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and the editor of Coleridge’s Responses: Coleridge on Nature and Vision (Continuum, 2008). She has also written articles on figures in Transatlantic Romanticism such as Coleridge, Thoreau, Emerson, and the landscape painter Thomas Cole. She is the organizer of a public lecture series called “Interdisciplinary Explorations: The Idea of Nature,” which is now in its fifth year.

Daniel Eltringham is working towards an AHRC-supported PhD at Birkbeck College on William Wordsworth, J. H. Prynne and the commons. He has published on R. F. Langley and Sean Bonney, with a book chapter forthcoming on Peter Riley and a commentary on Peter Larkin. His poetry and translations have appeared in The Clearing, Intercapillary Space, Alba Londres 6: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Scabs are Rats Zine 4, as well as two pamphlets, Mystics and Ithaca. He co-edits Girasol Press and The Literateur.

F5: New Horizons in Medieval and Early Modern Ecocriticism

Cannibalism, Ecophobia, and Titus Andronicus Simon C. Estok, (Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul)

David Goldstein begins an important discussion of the consequences for the Old World of discoveries of “cannibalism” in the New World with an observation in his fascinating Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (2014) that “an analysis of Titus [Andronicus] in an American context shows us a play organized around misuses of cooking and eating with roots not only in classical literature but in the behaviors of Iberian, Brazilian, and Aztec warriors” (34). The startlingly visceral responses the play evokes, moreover, hit the gut, as it were, of our anxieties about arbitrary ethics, about why one kind of meat is more acceptable than another, about the proximity of the human and nonhuman, and about geographies of difference. With careful attention to what Sigfried Schmidt calls “empirical and systemic studies,” my talk will show that English representations of cannibalism detail what is both an ecophobic and a deeply insular and xenophobic set of boundaries with manifold implications.

Earth's Prospects Lowell Duckert, (West Virginia University)

This chapter confronts mountaintop removal mining (MTR) in West Virginia and Appalachia, one of the most dire environmental issues today, on unlikely ground: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of the “prospect.” Derived from the Latin prospectare and prospicere, the “prospect” was more than a mining term; it could denote that which faces forward in time and space, the relative senses of such, or a view itself. But “prospect” could also describe an action – to face forward, to situate, and the anticipated results of such. I will focus on one earthy text in particular, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667/74), not just to show how mining has devastating ecological consequences (it does), but also, and more importantly, to argue that mining is an ecotheoretical means of conceptualizing different “prospect[s] wide / And various” (5.88-9), a way of wondering about better futures on and with the Earth/earth. Earth faces the human in prospective directions; the look downward is simultaneously a look forward in time. Borrowing a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari who believe mines are non-teleological “lines of flight” that transport bodies across “smooth spaces” of becoming, I believe that mines of flight have the ability to create nature-culture assemblages of desire in addition to conditions of socio-economic squalor, environmental sickness, and geological ruin. Coalfield sociologist Rebecca R. Scott has recently examined the (illogical) “logic of extraction” that perpetuates the environmental injustices of MTR. My hope is that the early modern “prospect” alters contemporary debates that harmfully divide humans from the landscape and pit economic interests against environmental ones— offering us, instead, prospective futures in which the lives of both humans and nonhumans are mutually enriched.

The Sea Above Jeffrey J. Cohen, (George Washington University)

Around the year 1200 on a day of thick, low clouds, some churchgoers saw an anchor caught upon a tombstone. Its taught rope stretched skyward, vanishing into the overhanging cloudbank. A man shimmied down the line, pulling himself along as if underwater. The parishioners seized the sailor from the sky when he attempted to free the anchor, and he drowned in the humidity of “our” air. His fellow shipmen could be heard shouting in the clouds above. When he did not respond they cut the rope and sailed away, leaving corpse and anchor at that ocean floor upon which we dwell. To imagine the skies a sea is to open a space of possibility, danger and refuge. Genesis describes God separating the waters which preexist his commands as the primal act of creation. Clouds swell and flow like the waves they are. Air is a living, roiled element. The heavens are the domain of gods or demons, but from time to time a more human story may be glimpsed, suspended above mere earthly dwellers. Early Irish annals record airborne ships. Even though we navigate clouds in planes, we still populate the skies with UFOs, with creatures whose unmoored lives are not our own. The sea above offers a perilous freedom from mundane boundedness – and perhaps from what Dan Brayton has called our terrestrial bias. This essay explores what becomes possible in envisioning water-air as a marinal expanse of alien familiarity, a space of traverse and encounter. Dante wrote that “The sky is like a book with its pages spread out plainly, containing the future in secret letters.” That future, it seems, includes one in which mariners continue to appear, bringing with them a perspective on earthly dwelling that we can never quite believe, contain, or long hold. To view the earth as an aerial sailor might is to see the land as an ecology roiled by the elements, a domain larger than the small ambits of mere human inhabitation. To sail the sky is to open earthly dwelling to the possibilities that whirl throughout the stormy meeting of water and air with a land marked by tombstones that catch but cannot hold, a land that gathers people into small churches, a land in which an ethereal sailor perishes because we do not grasp that we inhabit someone else’s shifting foundation.

Night’s Black Agents: Shakespeare and the Ecology of Night Todd Andrew Borlik (University of Huddersfield)

In the ecocritical imaginary, habitat is all too often framed in purely spatial terms. Scant attention has been paid to the night as a spatiotemporal habitat unto itself––one whose endangerment in post-Edison civilization often goes unprotested. Informed by recent histories of the dark, such as Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire and Paul Bogard’s The End of Night, this paper ransacks Shakespeare’s oeuvre to recover the spectrum of cultural attitudes toward night pre-electrification. In Macbeth, Shakespeare associates darkness with witchcraft and nocturnal predation. Fear of the dark can thus be taken as symptomatic of the “ecophobia” Simon Estok diagnoses as endemic in the early modern period. Yet Shakespeare’s writing also captures the otherness of the night, exposing the limitations of diurnal knowledge and of human dominion. Some Shakespearean characters, such as Falstaff and Shallow, co-exist comfortably with the darkness, and his plays feature unforgettable odes to the night as the ideal environment for love, revelry, or mystical contemplation of the sublimity of the cosmos. Shakespeare, I will argue, registers the ambiguous impact of Copernican Revolution, which triggered an epistemological crisis and a salubrious de-centering of humanity, but also exacerbated fear of darkness. The paper thus stakes a claim for the importance of early modern literature as a means of re-capturing the ecological mystique of the pre-electrified night, and re-learning how to dwell within it rather than obliterate it.

F5 Presenter Biographies

Simon C. Estok

Lowell Duckert

Jeffrey J. Cohen

Todd Andrew Borlik

F6: STORIES OF CHANGE 4: Making Energy Visible

Darkness Visible: what roles do the materiality and traceability of coal as an energy resource have in the early plays of D. H. Lawrence? Robert Butler (Open University)

The coal-mining village of Eastwood, eight miles west of Nottingham, provides an unusually vivid perspective on energy sources, the communities that were convened around energy extraction, and the visibility of energy systems within the lives of working-class families. D H Lawrence spent his first 21 years in Eastwood and three of his earliest and most autobiographical narratives are plays set in this coal-mining community.

A liminal figure at a moment of great transition, Lawrence existed on the borderlands of an agricultural and industrial society, a working class and a middle class, and popular culture and High Culture. But his three early plays - "A Collier's Friday Night", "The Daughter-in-Law" and "The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd" - are richly-textured accounts of everyday life. In these plays Lawrence captured "the shape and sound of a particular way of living" (Raymond Williams) and was "probably the first English playwright to write truthfully about the working class" (Peter Gill).

Today we are part of a globalised economy: coal accounts for 40% of Britain's electricity and 85% of that is imported. Where it comes from and how it's consumed has become largely invisible. But Lawrence's early plays offer - in spite of all the hardship they depict - a readily graspable vision of a connected world of human-energy relations.

How did Lawrence re-imagine the spatial interdependence of this world in terms of theatre? What unmapped areas of human experience does he open up in these three accounts? And how did the formal attributes of the theatre of his day - the plays were written between 1909 and 1911 - both free and constrain his vision of this world?

Oil’s Afterlives and Affects: Annie Ross’ Happy Birthday Super Cheaper Deena Rymhs (UBC Canada)

Annie Ross’ Happy Birthday Super Cheaper, a self-published volume of poetry and accompanying installation art, re-casts normative notions of value by recovering the discards of consumer culture. Named after a former gas station in California that Ross fondly describes as a “wacky” mini mart “filled with papier-mâché life-sized elephants, tigers, and giraffes wearing party hats,” Happy Birthday Super Cheaper consists of salvaged items, mainly animal figurines, that Ross rescued from their path to the landfill. Beneath this book’s offbeat playfulness is a viewing experience difficult to characterize in its affective range: the small, kitschy installations evoke tenderness and surprise while haunting the viewer with the violence of being reduced to waste. Ross’ transformation of the unwanted leavings of capitalism emerges as an ethical and spiritual act of remediation. My paper turns its focus to Happy Birthday Super Cheaper’s namesake of a filling station, a curious detail that suggests the extent to which oil saturates our psychic, social, and physical worlds. The filling station disappears from view in the collection immediately after Ross names it as the original inspiration for this art series, and it is this absent presence that forms a critical part of Ross’s commentary on consumption, attachment, and unrecognized dependencies. For a work like Happy Birthday Super Cheaper, whose deep ecology emphasizes human/non-human connections while blurring categories of animate/inanimate, there couldn’t be a more fitting example than oil for revealing human dependence on seemingly lifeless matter (matter that is, in fact, organic and slowing decomposing) or the murky distinction between organic and inorganic materials. Ross poetry and art similarly confront the extent to which fossil fuels, automotive culture, and capitalist consumption shape our attachments and our ecologies, but her work offers a representational frame that steps out of the economic relations, notions of value, and subjection of the non-human world underwritten by capitalism.

F6 Presenter Biographies

Robert Butler

Deena Rymhs Panel Session G: Friday 4th September 10.45am-12.15am

G1: Dialogic Interspecies Ethics Literary Responses to the Species Boundary in Primate Literature

Dialogical ecofeminist perspectives in “The Moths” by Helena María Viramontes and “Women Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros Imelda Martín Junquera (Universidad de León)

This proposal intends to analyse two very well-known stories by two prominent Chicana writers such as Viramontes and Cisneros from an ecofeminist perspective. It is my aim to approach both texts having in mind previous analysis that have been published as well as to introduce an innovative theoretical frame that contemplates literary texts, women and nature as being in constant conversational relationships. These dialogical relationships subvert the traditional domination of nature promoted by patriarchal cultures, which set the human being, especially the male representative, as superior to other living entities and as the only one with “agency” thus rendering the rest as passive. Women, traditionally associated with nature because of their reproductive and nurturing qualities, have been discriminated and identified with that passive and submissive attitude attributed to nature as well as other ethnic and sexual minorities. Chicana writers from the 1980 and 1990s have been attempting to provide agency to Chicana women and the natural elements they portray in their narratives and poetry. A very clear example is represented by Viramontes’ “The Moths,” where even the title states the importance of the little insects in the story as well as that of the three generations of women whose lives intersect in the narrative. Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek” deals with a parallel story of submission and resistance in which a dialogical relationship with the river and the surrounding nature serves to provide agency to the protagonist.

Literary Responses to the Species Boundary in Primate Literature Diana Villanueva Romero (Franklin Institute-GIECO / University of Extremadura)

The history of the animal liberation movement in the Western world reached a significant point with the foundation in 1994 of the Great Ape Project (GAP), an initiative aimed at obtaining the recognition of three basic rights for great apes: the right to life, protection of individual liberty, and prohibition of torture. Although this international movement finally led to failed attempts in New Zealand and Spain to gain legal rights for great apes, it also stirred heated debate on the nature of human-animal relationships. Traditionally, in the sphere of fiction writing, the ape or nonhuman primate has been since antiquity the source of stories that played with the definition of the human in an attempt to establish the ground for a differentiation that would save face for the Homo sapiens. Interestingly, since the beginning of the modern animal liberation movement in the 1970s and thanks to the development of scientific fields such as cognitive ethology, primatology, and trans-species psychology, some fiction writers have produced works that develop new ways of thinking about the nonhuman primate. Some of them show the potential of literature to suggest alternative forms of dealing with the species boundary, thus contributing to the creation of the counter-hegemonic strategies deemed necessary by Val Plumwood in order to establish a balanced relationship with the more-than-human world. In this paper two novels, Peter Dickinson’s Eva (1988) and Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish (1995), will be contrasted with the aim of showing how contemporary literary responses to human- nonhuman primate relationships can be as valid a form of thinking about the animal as the philosophical roots of movements such as the GAP.

Humans, Buggers and Pequeninos: Alien Voices in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga Irene Sanz Alonso (Franklin Institute—GIECO/ University of Alcalá)

Science fiction is populated with human and non-human characters that continuously challenge readers’ expectations about species boundaries. Many of the works classified within this genre only portray human’s perspective of othered creatures such as aliens and robots, without offering the possibility of an interspecies dialogue. But, what if aliens were given the opportunity to communicate? What if human beings were able to understand aliens’ fears and hopes? In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, the author portrays several examples of interspecies communication, and it is through these human-alien-artificial intelligence dialogues that the protagonists of these novels propose a re-classification of the idea of otherness based on pacific cohabitation. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which Scott Card rewrites the human- alien dualism through the more complex Hierarchy of Foreignness in which entities are not classified according to the observer’s (or human) perspective, but following a process of maturity which stems from the understanding of the other. Using Val Plumwood’s counter- hegemonic strategies as theoretical framework, this paper explores how the survival of a whole planet depends on an unexpected allegiance of human and nonhuman species that are able to pacifically coexist despite their differences.

G1: Presenter Biographies

Imelda Martín Junquera

Diana Villanueva Romero

Irene Sanz Alonso

G2: Experiential Landscapes

Ecopoetic Knowledge and Text: Self-Reflexivity, Relational Landscape and Metaleptic 'Epistemontology' in Alexis Wright's The Swan Book Arnaud Barras (University of Geneva)

The knowledge of one's surroundings is not fixed in time, but rather consists in a constantly evolving set of propositions (scientific, social, cultural, legal, etc.) and experiences (including emotions, perceptions, actions, and imaginations) that are updated through trial and error. An individual's ecological knowledge is idiosyncratic; it arises from a unique four- dimensional interaction between the organism and its sociocultural and physical environment. On a societal level, transforming this incommensurable epistemic body is incredibly arduous. However, the literary medium has the potential to convey a form of knowledge that moves beyond individualism: literary narratives have the ability to aestheticize nonlinear, dynamic and complex systems and to immerse readers in a fictional world. In the Australian Aboriginal episteme, knowledge (experiential or linguistic) and art (plastic, graphic, or performance) are ecological: in one way or another, they always refer to the matrix of interdependence and intersubjectivity of Country. In this essay, I argue that Alexis Wright's The Swan Book dramatizes an indigenous ecopoetic way of knowing that reveals to the reader the enmeshment of organism and environment and that invites the reader to reconsider the notion of Text as an ecological process. Through self-reflexivity, relational landscapes, and a metaleptic "epistemontology" (i.e., a neologism that underscores the indivisibility of knowing and being), The Swan Book enables readers to adjust their knowledge system and adopt what Gregory Bateson, Tim Ingold and Ted Toadvine have respectively called a "systemic view", a "dwelling perspective" and an "ecophenomenological understanding".

Savoir-faire of the elders: knowing and doing in the French Mediterranean hills Marella Hoffman (University of Cambridge)

This paper draws on a two-year ethnographic project with an 89-year-old shepherd in the remote hills of the French Mediterranean. The resulting book documented the self- sufficient, sustainable lifestyle of the shepherd’s village across much of the twentieth century. The paper takes a metaperspective, unwrapping the different levels of ‘green knowledge’ that nested around the project like Russian dolls. It explores how oral and written, institutional and subjective discourses competed and cooperated around the village. At the centre is Monsieur Marty, the shepherd who spoke 260 pages of detail on how the villagers herded goats, hunted, foraged, grew food-gardens and lived sustainably from the land. This green know-how was hugely valued by the culture that taught it to him, then discarded by consumerism, and is now again so precious that the authorities wanted it gathered from him, the ‘lone survivor’ of that eco-system. All around us were the technological achievements of the village council: wind-turbines, a reed-bed sewer-system, a solar farm. But while climate-change impacted harder each year, the shepherd’s first-hand eco-knowledge was about to be lost because no-one could get him to talk. While he and I sat in the dust for twenty-six two-hour interviews, the academic knowledge frameworks that I, his ethnographer, brought with me also hung in the air behind us, like flies. This engaging presentation uses maps, photos and audio to explore how picking through successive tangles of green knowledge can enrich our ecological initiatives.

Taiwanese environmental poets: eco-colonial and eco-centric themes Peter I-min Huang (Tamkang University)

In this paper, Peter I-min Huang ecocritically reads the poetry of Taiwanese poet Ka-hsiang Liu (劉克襄), Taiwanese-Chinese poet Guangzhong Yu (余光中), Paiwan poet Mona Neng ( 莫那能), and Atayal poet Walis Nokan (瓦歷斯．諾幹). His main focuses are Liu’s “At Kaohsiung Station” (在打狗驛), a veiled critique of Taiwan’s petrochemical industry and the heavy concentration of petrochemical plants in the south of Taiwan; Yu’s “Train Passing Fang Liao” (車過枋寮), a poem that nostalgically evokes Taiwan’s agricultural past yet offers the contemporary reader opportunity to engage with current debates about the decline of Taiwan’s agricultural sector; and Walis Nokan’s “Mountain is a School” (山是一座學校) and Mona Neng’s “When the Bell Rings” (鐘聲響起時). Huang situates the last two works in a growing body of postcolonial ecocriticism studies that address the history of “eco- colonialism” in Taiwan as this has especially affected Aboriginal people. He also draws on a definition of ecopoetry that Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street provide in their introduction to The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013).

G2 Presenter Biographies

Arnaud Barras

Former Cambridge academic, Marella Hoffman had previously lectured and researched at universities in France, Switzerland and Ireland. Now a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, she has worked extensively with government, using ethnographic oral history methods to circumvent conflict and generate community solutions. Her projects boosting the civic participation of poor and ethnic communities have been taught as positive practice models by government agencies. As well as writing books for academic publishers, she is chief editor of a public policy magazine for government in Cambridge, communicating policy to poorer communities.

Having completed a Freudian psychoanalysis with a Fellow of Cambridge University, her research interests include migration, identity-politics, orality and the way narratives shape social, political and economic structures. She is a co-author of international books like Location and Dislocation - Emigration and Irish Identities; Human Rights and Good Governance - Building Bridges; and Cross-Currents in European Literature. Recent solo books include the ethnography Savoir-faire of the Elders - Green knowledge in the French Mediterranean hills (Cahiers de la Salce, August 2015, written and published in French) and Asylum under dreaming spires - Refugees’ lives in Cambridge (for the Refugees’ Living Archive, University of East London, September 2015). Her forthcoming book, Hidden gold - Using contemporary oral history to shape public policy, will be published across the English- speaking world by Left Coast Press in the US. She has published a bilingual book of poetry on landscape in English and French, and her bilingual book of landscape fiction, In the Eagle’s Eye, will be published in 2016.

To see her awards and publications or to contact her, visit www.marellahoffman.com

Peter I-min Huang holds the position of Associate Professor, English Department, Tamkang University, Taiwan. He served as Chair of the English Department for two terms, 2008-2012, during which time he also was the conference organizing chairperson for the The Fifth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (17-18 December, 2010) and The Fourth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse (23-24 May, 2008). His areas of teaching and research include animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecopoetry, women’s studies, and postcolonialism. Dr. Huang specializes in English, Chinese, and Taiwanese literatures. His most recent publications are “Canon Formation in the Study of the Environment in China and Taiwan” and “Rediscovering local environmentalism in Taiwan” published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.4 (December 2014). Other publications include: “Corporate Globalization and the Resistance to It in Linda Hogan’s “People of the Whale and the poetry of Sheng Wu,” East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and “Exploring Non-Human Ethics in Linda Hogan’s Power and Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature,” Forum for World Literature Studies (2014). Dr. Huang is currently completing a monograph on Linda Hogan and Taiwanese environmental writers.

G3: Botanical insights

Knowledge Growth and Sustainability: A View from Biosemiotics Timo Maran (University of Tartu)

An essential principle of sustainable development is to keep human technological development and use of resources within the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Human knowledge appears to grow, however, without any borders (Kull 1998). This paradox is the central topic of my presentation: how can ever-growing knowledge support sustainable development? We have shown elsewhere that human ability to use symbolic sign systems for accumulating knowledge is deeply related with environmental degradation (Maran, Kull 2014). Probably most obstructive to sustainable development are highly abstract knowledge systems that tend to forget their history and connection to their original context. Humans act upon environment on the basis of their knowledge and imprint their semiotic character onto other living organisms and matter. This can have deterring effects for sign action of other organisms (Maran 2014). At the same time, in some biological phenomena (mimicry, biophony, cf. Kull 2010) it has been noticed that knowledge is spread and maintained by many species in biological community. I propose that human knowledge can be sustainable if it remains connected to such "ecological codes". In other words, human knowledge is sustainable if human action makes sense to the other inhabitants of the biosphere.

‘From the mute distance of things a sign must come’: stones and the ‘semiosphere’ Shelley Saguaro (University of Gloucestershire)

This paper builds on theoretical work by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Wendy Wheeler, Jane Bennett, Louise Westling and, in particular, Timo Maran and ‘Biosemiotic Criticism’. These theories are extended to stones in an approach posited here as ‘Lithosemiotic Criticism’. The paper briefly outlines ‘traditional’ and indigenous relations to stones, such as their importance: in world-wide religions and rituals; for artefacts; as co-inhabitants in Native American and other cultures. Leslie Marmon Silko notes that the prevailing human apprehension of landscapes, including stones, ‘assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys’ whereas ‘viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.’ (Silko, Yellow Woman, 27) However, it is the late work of Italo Calvino (Cosmicomics, Mr Palomar and the posthumously published, Six Memos for the Next Millennium) that is the main focus here, for Calvino’s repeated attention to the signifying vibrancy of stones. The closing words of his last publication take up a similar point to that made by Silko, and are further informed by his extensive reading of science, natural history and philosophy. Calvino’s last invocation constitutes the starting point of this paper’s ‘lithosemiotic critical’ position: ‘Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language […] to stone, to cement, to plastic …..’. (Calvino, Six Memos,122)

Fifty Shades of Green: Imagining Phytocentric Perspectives on Human Life Felix Sprang (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen)

In my presentation I would like to take the Platonic topos of man as an inverted tree (homo arbor inversa) as a point of departure and argue that we should rethink how we construe plant life vis-à-vis animal and human life. There are many ways of knowing plants, from "Gardeners' Questioning Time" to bioengineering. However, all these ways of knowing reduce plants to entities providing resources (food, oxygen, medicine) or giving pleasure. We empathise with animals but we have lost the culture of seeing the world from the plant's perspective. Knowledge of plant-animal communication is mostly generated in the field of pest control, and few scientific studies look at the interaction between humans and plants as both agents. While pharmacology and dietetics have scrutinized the dependency of humans on plants, ecocriticism and environmentalism have largely subscribed to the narrative that we must protect plants, thus further incapacitating plants. I would like to trace an emergent idea in ecocriticism that challenges that narrative: the notion that seeing the world from the plant's perspective, and, consequently, imagining phytocentric perspectives on humans, can radically question what we know about the natural world. My examples for that emerging field come from poetry, and it is my contention that innovative metaphors and similes are best suited for imagining plant life as a life with agency. I will discuss attempts to construe knowledge from a phytocentric perspective in the poetry of Erasmus Darwin, John Clare, and Alice Oswald. Ultimately, though, these thought experiments in poetic form are discussed as forays into a (largely) forgotten plant-human relationship that could be at the heart of imagining new ways of knowing the natural world as we enter the anthropocene.

G3 Presenter Biographies

Timo Maran

Shelley Saguaro

Felix Sprang

G4: Early Modern to Miltonic environmentalism

Knowing the Garden: Finding our Roots in John Milton’s Eden Elizabeth Cook (University of Birmingham)

Hannah Arendt once denounced the human expression of a desire to return to a more ‘natural’ or more biocentric state of human existence as ridiculously naïve, arguing that it would constitute a regression to a more primitive anthropological state. My proposed paper will ask why it is that we need nature, and why we feel as though we must ‘go back’ to it – why it is so often considered a separate entity unto ourselves, and why we feel we must rediscover our ‘roots’. It will attempt uncover the significance of these roots as portrayed in John Milton’s literary depiction of the Garden of Eden in his biblical epic Paradise Lost. It will do so in an attempt to address and unearth the meaning of ‘knowing nature’ in relation to our own lives, and in particular how it relates to our own sense of wellbeing and health. This paper will discuss these views in relation to Milton’s depiction of the dramatic change in the humanity-nature relationship following the original sin and the subsequent impact of this shift on the way we think about ‘knowing’ nature, and how our perceptions are influenced by such literature. Furthermore, it will examine Milton’s initial depiction of Adam and Eve as stewards of the natural world in relation to our own contemporary conservation efforts, and conversely our the Fall of Adam and Eve and our own interference with and exploitation of the natural world, as we work towards defining the concept of ‘green knowledge’.

Endarkenment Environmentalism: The Anthropocene as a shadow New Atlantis Matthew Griffiths

The notion that we inhabit the Anthropocene, in which humanity itself constitutes the status of a geological force, gains cultural traction in part because it seems to represent the fulfilment of a long-held ambition – specifically, the project of dominating nature. This paper will argue that this project crystallised with the emergence of humanism in the early modern era, and will read a text of this period for the knowledge that it anticipates but is unable to exhibit. In his 1627 work The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon imagines the utopian island of Bensalem, one of whose inhabitants tells the narrator: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This paper will propose that the Anthropocene represents the ultimate achievement of this agenda, enlarging “the bounds of human empire” as far as possible; but also that this dominance has resulted from not knowing “the secret motions of things” to which Bacon refers. I contend that the Anthropocene instead represents the accumulation of what we have ruled out as side effects, in the terms of Ulrich Beck’s sociology of risk. Using Beck’s work, I will show that humanity’s wish to attain “knowledge of causes” is not the foundation of our power, as in Bacon’s formulation, but a retrospective attempt to account for the unanticipated power to “effect all things possible”.

‘Witness ye Springs, ye Meads and Groves’: Foregrounding the Background in the Pastorals of Aphra Behn Heidi Laudien (Manhattan College)

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) liked green spaces. She employed them in every genre of her writing throughout the entirety of her career. From her drama to her prose fiction to her personal correspondence, green spaces abound—she even gifted in green, sending “a Bottle of Orange-flour Water” to an acquaintance (O’Donnell, entry 040).21 Is this what it means to be green in the Renaissance? In his 2011 study, What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment, Ken Hiltner argues that even though Renaissance pastoral is frequently concerned with literal landscapes, it “does little to describe them” and does not “offer detailed representations of the environment?”.22 Hiltner’s argument falls short, however, because he fails to consider the contributions of women writers such as Aphra Behn. Behn wrote pastorals that describe the literal landscape in ways that were bold, original and detailed. Even her contemporaries recognized her innovations with the form and freely commented on her compelling landscapes.23 Despite anxieties over art’s ability to represent nature, a point that Hiltner suggests as to why writers sidestepped writing the landscape, Behn wrote pastorals that deploy mimesis, making a “green reading” possible. Through a close reading of her pastorals, I argue that Behn’s landscapes destabilize existing notions of the pastoral space as an idealized and organized place and disorientate the reader’s conventional expectations of pastoral nature. Instead of avoiding representing nature, Behn relishes doing so in the very manner that Hiltner argues is absent from pastoral poetry of the time.

G4 Presenter Biographies

Elizabeth Cook

Matthew Griffiths

21 O’Donnell, Mary Ann. An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. New York: Garland, 1986. 22 Hiltner, Ken. What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment. Ithaca: Cornell UP (2011): 2-4. 23 See stanza five of Kendrick’s dedicatory poem, “To Mrs. B. on her Poems” that prefaces Lycidus: Or, the Love in Fashion (1688).

Heidi Laudien is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Manhattan College where she has been teaching for the last 15 years. She has published on Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Singer Rowe and is currently on sabbatical working on a book-length project on the contributions of early modern women to the pastoral.

G5: Contemporary Poetry

Ways of Knowing in the Poetry of Philip Gross Hugh Dunkerley (University of Chichester)

Philip Gross’s work has long referenced poetry as a kind of via negativa, as suggested in the title of his collection The Egg of Zero (2006). Since then his work has continued to mine a particular seam of poetic subtraction. In this paper I will be examining the ways in which images of the non-human in his work are used to examine the limits of knowledge, but also to suggest the potential for dwelling in a more-than-human world. In particular, I will be looking at the poems and photos in his collaborative collection I Spy Pinhole Eye, the images of water in The Water Table and the chronicling of his father’s aphasia in Deep Field.

On Touch and Vision: Kathleen Jamie’s Bodies Alan Macpherson (University of Aberdeen)

A central concern of Kathleen Jamie’s recent work, in both poetry and prose, has been the recuperation of bodily nature. It is her contribution to overcoming what she refers to as the ‘foreshortened version of nature […that it’s] all primroses and otters’. As she writes in ‘Pathologies’, ‘[t]here’s our own intimate, inner natural world, the body’s weird shapes and forms, and sometimes they go awry’ (Sightlines, p. 24). Jamie’s writing of the damaged, diseased, and fragmented human body is informed by anatomical illustrations, the objects collected in anatomy museums, her encounters in a pathology lab, and her own experience of illness and recovery. Each of these offers a variation on attentiveness, whether in the explorative inquiry of the nineteenth century anatomist, the technologically mediated vision of the pathologist, or the gaze of the artist. These varied modes of looking and touching which filter through her writing make for a body of work charged with productive representations, yet also riven by unexpected tensions. My paper will negotiate a path through this strand of Jamie’s recent work by considering the relationship that emerges between vision, touch and writing, and between the perceiving body and the body perceived. I will begin by asking how such diverse modes of perception – scientific, medical and artistic – come together in Jamie’s writing in order to help us reconsider our understanding of the human body within the natural world.

Material States of Poetry: the Creative Collaborations of Simon Armitage’s Stanza Stones Project Emma Trott (University of Leeds)

At the 2011 Ilkley Literature Festival, Simon Armitage premiered six poems that were to be carved onto separate stones on the Pennine watershed in West Yorkshire. Each poem describes water in a different state (rain, beck, mist, snow, dew, puddle), and while the poems stand individually, they comprise a poetic ecology. The project was collaborative: for example, Armitage’s words were inscribed by stone-mason Pip Hall. This generates enquiry into the nature of creativity, while moments when the stone’s size or surface demanded a shortening of words reveal one aspect of this material poetics. In accompanying discursive texts, Armitage’s description of his creative process suggests it is organic: material and accumulative. The Yorkshire landscape is central, both literally and ideologically, as are interactions between the stone-poems and their audience. This paper explores Armitage’s public art project in the context of contemplating the nature of 21st-century ecopoetics, where ‘ecopoetics’ means a manifested understanding of relationship between organic and poetic forms, with an ethical consciousness. The Stanza Stones privilege water’s mutability. That material transformation is connected with concerns about environmental degradation, and the stones have the potential to become gravestones memorialising an ecosystem that is currently at risk. They embody Stacy Alaimo’s ‘recognition not just that everything is interconnected but that humans are the very stuff of the material, emergent world’: in this unique project, poet and audience are changed by experience of the landscape, and the poetry is absorbed by the landscape, which becomes neither human nor non-human but a composite mix.

G5 Presenter Biographies

Hugh Dunkerley

Alan Macpherson is a second year AHRC funded PhD student in English & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen working on contemporary ecopoetics (broadly conceived) and intermediality.

Emma Trott

G6: STORIES OF CHANGE 5: Communities and energy

Shifting energy identities within community owned renewable energy initiatives Jarra Hicks (U of New South Wales, Australia) Communities are increasingly engaged in energy transitions to cleaner sources and more efficient use, often driven by a desire to take positive action on climate change and to secure energy from clean, renewable, local sources (Walker & Devine-Wright 2007: Seyfang et al 2013; Hopkins 2008; Bulkeley & Moser 2007). The processes and outcomes from establishing community owned renewable energy initiatives are expanding the range of viable options for driving modern energy transitions, opening the local as an important source of action and innovation (Mulugetta et al 2010; Cameron & Hicks 2014). In countries with well-developed community energy sectors, such as Germany, Denmark and Scotland, the collective impact of these projects, in terms of mega-watts of installed renewable energy generation or local economic return, is significant (Yildiz et al. 2015).

But what have community owned renewable energy projects contributed to local people’s own sense of self and their sense of community and place? How has being involved in these projects changed their relationship to energy and technology?

Drawing on a series of interviews, focus groups and participant observation with two Australian case studies, I explore these questions and their implications for shifting energy identities. Through participation in community owned renewable energy initiatives, people’s relationship with technology and energy is shifting, as is their sense of agency, all of which have implications for their identity as a community member and an energy citizen. The stories that emerge from interviews and observation are used to analyse the contribution of community owned renewable energy initiatives to creating the conditions needed for broader societal transitions to clean energy futures.

Solar Sanctuaries and the Parable of the Good Samaritan: Ethical Narratives of Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Michael S Northcott (University of Edinburgh)

Churches in the Scottish Borders which identify as ‘Scottish Ecocongregations’ are investing time and money in conserving energy and adopting renewable power in church buildings. Exemplary action by churches in siting solar panels on the roof of the sanctuary is also reported to influence other church members and citizens in installing solar panels on their homes. Energy and environmental activists in congregations in Selkirk and Moffat identify the New Testament injunction to love the neighbour in the story of the Good Samaritan as motive for their investment in energy conservation and renewable energy. Narrating the transition to renewable power, and energy conservation, as planetary good neighbourliness, church members indicate that they accept the scientific account that greenhouse gas emissions are harming the environments of farmers, fishers and other persons in other parts of the world, and of future generations. This conception of planetary neighbourhood represents a spatial and temporal reconfiguration of the narrative of the Good Samaritan, in which transition to renewable action is represented as neighbourly action which conserves the climate of people and species in places distant in time and space from those initiating such actions.

The story of hydro energy from land of K2: Socio cultural influences of Tarbela power project Humera Farah (Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan) The majestic Himalayan range of Pakistan carries K2, 2nd highest mountain in the world, along with vast glaciers, providing melt water for Indus and other rivers. Tarbela hydro project is located on Indus River, remotely in North West province of Pakistan. Completed in 1974, it is the largest earth filled dam in world and second largest by volume. This article presents an interdisciplinary examination of socio-cultural influences of Tarbela hydro project through historical texts, documentaries and personal accounts. Being an indigenous renewable energy source, it is portrayed among custodians of Pakistani society; augmenting culture of transformation, introduced through imported fossil fuels derived electrification. It pours inexpensive 3700 MW into national grid, meeting approximately 20% of country’s power needs. Being multifaceted, it also stores water from Indus River for irrigation, controls floods and serves as a well-known recreational area; hence improving agro-based livelihood, providing employment, saving life and infrastructure downstream. Through land acquisition for its build up, 135 villages were downed and 96,000 people were displaced. Although the national resettlement policy was not developed then, agricultural land owners were agreed to be compensated with cultivable acreage in other provinces. However, many of displaced people still ponder in courts for restitution. Some refused to migrate, terming it a forced ethnic displacement. For those, not eligible for agricultural land, new villages/colonies were built along the fringe of the reservoir; though civic amenities such as education, health and environment require improvement. For many others in surrounding communities, project has solely fetched conservation of impoverishment.

G6 Presenter Biographies

Jarra Hicks

Michael S Northcott

Humera Farah

Panel Session H: Friday 4th September 1.15pm-2.45pm

H1: Children’s books and the environment

Ecocriticism and children’s narratives: contemporary representations of disability Lara Bober (McGill University)

Beginning with a review of articulations of ecocriticism and its significance for ecopedagogy and children’s literature, this essay draws on the conceptual resources of these debates to analyse representations of illness and (dis)ability in recently published award-winning fiction for children. Classic children’s literature is replete with flattened representations of disability invoking notions of sentimentality or sympathy; often depictions of characters with disabilities are included as literary symbolism or to emphasize moral decisions of other characters (Curwood, 2013). Studies of contemporary children’s and young adult literature have concluded that, despite many positive shifts in public thinking and in the educational sector, literary representations tend to homogenize, essentialize, and marginalize experiences of disability. Positive social change can be discerned in the introduction of literary awards focusing on representations of disability such as the American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award. This essay will argue that positive representations of child protagonists living with illness and/or (dis)ability serve two concurrent objectives: these stories provide counter-narratives (Mitchell & Snyder, 2000; Curwood, 2013) which emphasize children’s capabilities and self-advocacy, while at the same time providing pedagogical tools to educate young readers about ecology through wonder and imagination (Greene, 1995; Lesnik-Oberstein, 1998; Maagerø & Østbye, 2012). Additionally, environmental themes in children’s literature provide a counterpoint to constraints imposed by architecture as well as pathological perspectives focusing solely on medical intervention. Compelling depictions of children’s interactions with natural environments bring into relief the barriers created by social environments. Children’s literature can also provide an enduring contribution to public debates on the social, historical and cultural positioning of disability, leading to new ways of conceptualizing environmental ethics.

What did she say? Secondary school students’ responses to a book title. Nina Goga (University of Bergen)

A recently published article (Bergthaller et al. 2014, s. 262) pinpoints the fact that “the ecological crisis is not only a crisis of the physical environment but also a crisis of the cultural and social environment” (p. 262). Thus, the climate challenges of our time should be studied not just through the texts and speeches of nature scientists and environmental politicians, they should be understood through language itself. The climate challenges are also about how language limits, shapes and makes perceptible and sensible the world in which we live our lives, in which life grows and takes shape. The task of understanding how language usage can decide the future of the earth is complicated and challenging. Who should be challenged to take on this challenge? Politicians, economists, scientists? Absolutely. But also educational systems that shape and prepare the youth for a future in which the biodiversity is threatened and, as a consequence, language as well as it becomes less diverse. In our efforts to take care of our environment as a basis of future life, it is essential that we also take care of language, to preserve linguistic sensitivity, nuances and diversity. In my research I have studied how secondary-school students respond to the challenging, and unusual, verbal and visual representations of nature and climate change in the Norwegian crossover picturebook poem Hva var det hun sa? (2014, What did she say?) by Agnar Lirhus and Rune Markhus.24 The aim of this project is to study whether, and if so, how, the reading of experimental and ecopoetic literature may influence students’ thoughts about nature. How do they express their responses to the text? Is their linguistic repertoire sufficient or do they have to tip-finger through the landscape of language?

Ecological disaster in Vytautas Petkevičius book for children Didysis medžiotojas Mikas Pupkus Inga Mitunevičiūtė (The Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore and The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania)

During the period of soviet regime in Lithuania to speak openly about the devastating nature was equal to condemn yourself to get several years in prison. The huge difference between reality and what propaganda of ideal society and clean environment proclaimed impelled writers to look for indirect express of their ecological ideas. There will be used a hypothesis in the lecture that in this case children‘s literature and genre of fairy tales is a way to discuss risky topics using specifics and instruments contained in children‘s literature. The genre of falsehood tales will be approached as a part of Aesopus language used during Soviet times – a part which indicates the search of genre and language that allows the realistic description of ecological situation. The lecture contains discusion of Vytautas Petkevičius (1930-2008) book for children „Didysis medžiotojas Mikas Pupkus“ using an angle of ecocriticism. The book, which lacked recognition and actualization at the time of publishing in 1969, now suprises us with progressive ecological ideas; we find that hyperboles and litotes are used in describing interaction between nature and human beings, disastrous effects on nature exerted by humans, ecological crisis caused by them and possible postapocalyptic results, human responsibility, moral and ethic basis for his actions are also pointed out here.

H1 Presenter Biographies

Lara Bober

Nina Goga is an associate professor at Bergen University College, Norway. Her most recent publications are Gå til mauren. Om maur og danning i barnelitteraturen (2013, On Ants and Bildung in Children’s literature), “Kart og krim. Litterære kart og steders betydning i krimserier for barn” (2014, Maps in Crime fiction for children), “Learn to read. Learn to live. The Role of Books and Book Collections in Picturebooks” (2013) and “Children and Childhood in Scandinavian Children’s Literature over the Last Fifty Year” (2013).

Inga Mitunevičiūtė

H2: Un/Reframing modes of attention

Of 'Ferny, Mossy Discoveries': Digitally Modeling the Landscapes of Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth Alicia Peaker (Middlebury College)

As the practice of close reading begins to make way for distant reading (Moretti), digital

24 The research is part of a research project on Nature in Children’s literature at Bergen University College, Norway. tools and methods are opening up new ways of understanding and reading literature. But as of yet, there are few digital projects which take as their subject environmental literature (the collaborative work of Stephanie Posthumus and Stéfan Sinclair being a notable exception). The increasing usefulness of digital methods to textual analysis raises several questions: How might the ecosystems and landscapes of novels be represented digitally? Can we develop useful digital models for better contextualizing human characters within the fictional natural worlds they inhabit? And what impacts might such models have on the ways we read and understand literatures of the environment?

I begin to address these questions through a scaled reading (both close and distant) of Mary Webb’s 1917 novel Gone to Earth. The novel, set in Shropshire, is filled with the presence of living things. Webb’s textual representations of the natural world often take the form of adjectives, similes, and metaphors: the protagonist Hazel Woodus is “tawny and foxlike” and “sexless as a leaf.” The natural world is invoked at least as frequently as it is directly represented. Do such distinctions--between an actual and invoked natural world--matter in our understanding of the novel? By digitally modeling the shifting relationships, presences, and absences of the natural world, as represented in the novel, I argue that Webb’s strategy of invocation animates the landscapes she has created and draws strong connections between the human characters and their environments.

Stretching, Bending, Breaking the Frame: Possibilities in Green Popular Culture John Parham (University of Worcester)

Critics have frequently deployed ‘framing’ to characterise how media and popular culture allegedly divert our understanding of land, animals, and environmental issues towards anthropocentric or ideological perspectives. Examples encompass Anders Hansen’s work on environmental news coverage and Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s stringent critique of mainstream cinema. Yet the metaphor of framing – fixing things into place – is too static for a dialectical ‘media ecology’ (which corresponds to ecology’s own fluidity). This paper:

• Summarises the influence of framing on green media/cultural studies. • Couples methodological critiques of frame analysis with an understanding that green popular culture should be characterised not through framing but, rather, as a complex, contradictory conjunction (Sean Cubitt) of ideological and ecological imperatives. • Provides a case study – the recurrent deployment of the romantic narrative frame in popular environmental culture. While often underwriting patriarchal or heterosexual norms, romance is contradictory. For example, both fluctuations in romance plots (Jean Radford) and tampering with the genre itself have been applied to represent equivalent discordance in ecological relations – whether our dual affinity with/estrangement from ‘nature’ or the complexities/compromises of social ecology. • Discusses Isao Takahata’s anime Only Yesterday. The film melds rural nostalgia and disillusion with capitalist modernity via Taeko, an office worker, re-evaluating her life during a summer working on her relative Toshio’s farm. Their hesitant romance, and her tentative decision to stay, foregrounds the uncertain and provisional nature by which we commit (if at all) to nature and romance alike.

Screening: Cacophonous Silence and introduction (by Skype) Jess Allen (University of Manchester) and Bronwyn Preece (University of Huddersfield, Canada)

We offer for screening at Green Knowledge our site-specific, trans-national, collaborative film: Cacophonous Silence (The Sound of Falling Wildly) – falling beautifully into your solicited niche for ‘avant-garde ecopoetics’, telematically transcribed through ‘experimental, emergent new discourses.’ The 8-minute film is the visual product of a performance experiment in eco-activism: an attempt to interrogate and articulate our respective relations to notions of ‘The’ and ‘our own’ wild, exploring our very ‘knowing and unknowing of the natural world.’ Forming two (virtual) arboreal arcs over the northern hemisphere, the film sets out to capture a somatic and movement-based re-conception of the ancient Zen koan: ‘If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear, does it still make a sound?’ This slow performance began with a ceremonial exchange of written words, scribed and mailed to each other on handmade paper, wildcrafted from the bioregional plant fibers that had fallen on our respective forest floors. Once received these paper ‘tablets’ were taken on a reciprocal journey by each performer into ‘their’ woods and became witness to a filmed improvisation with a simple score: an exploration of our own bodies falling in place. What can our own wild falling - our commitment to fall, to be hurt, to embrace uncertainty together and trans-nationally – reveal about how we might respond to a falling wild in an era of anthropogenic ecological crisis?

Rough Beasts: Predators and Man. Rewilding the human imagination from the caves to cyberspace Nicholas Foxton (Kingston University)

The large mammalian predators that we shared most of our evolutionary history with survive in ever decreasing numbers but still haunt our imaginations. This paper looks back at the iconography of the apex predators from the Paleolithic to the present, in a range of art, mythology and literature and forward to the contemporary implications of the restorative ecological strategy of ‘rewilding’.

Rewilding is an attempt to restore ecological ‘balance’ or ‘harmony’ within seriously degraded ecosystems of the developed world. The most controversial element is the idea of predator reintroductions, which is a particular concern in the European context. Whilst we evolved as a species alongside the same charismatic megafauna that adorn our art, literature and imaginations (the same species hunted as trophy animals by great white hunters wielding ochre or more recently cameras or rifles) , the idea of rewilding as a means of re-establishing a supposed ecological balance frequently founders on the issue of the predators. Our relationship with the predators extends back to the Paleolithic. This paper looks at the iconography of some of the Old World Big Cats, considers the theoretical implications of rewilding and explores two British case studies that point the way forward to how rewilding has and might transform the British Isles.

H2 Presenter Biographies

Alicia Peaker is currently the Council on Library and Information Resources/Digital Library Federation (CLIR/DLF) Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury College in Vermont. Her dissertation, “Our English Ground”: Women, Literature, and the Environment, 1900-1950 explored how women writing in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century contributed to ecological discourses through representations of the natural world and nationalism. During her doctoral work at Northeastern University, she also worked as the Co-Director of the award-winning digital humanities project Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, as the Project Manager for The Women Writers Project, and as the Development Editor for GradHacker. Her current work sits at the intersection of literary studies, ecocriticism, and digital humanities.

John Parham

Jess Allen is an aerial dancer, ecological performer and walking artist from Aberystwyth, Wales with a yurt, a horse and a dog. She is currently doing a (second) PhD in walking and moving in rural landscapes as an eco-activist arts practice, with a President’s Doctoral Scholarship from the University of Manchester. She uses walking to create unexpected performative encounters in unusual locations. Originally a biologist, she gained her first PhD from Aberystwyth before re-training in contemporary dance, latterly at Coventry where she was awarded an MA with distinction in Dance Making and Performance. She has worked as landscape officer, dance lecturer (anatomy/improvisation), arts facilitator and aerial performer for Blue Eyed Soul (UK/US), Full Tilt and everyBODY dance. allinadayswalk.org.uk | dropintheocean.org.uk | tiltingatwindmills.org.uk | trans- missions.org.uk

Bronwyn Preece lives off-the-grid, in a solar and waterwheel-powered house in Canada. She is an improvisational performer, community applied theatre practitioner, walking eARThist and the pioneer of earthBODYment. She is currently doing a PhD-at-a-distance through the University of Huddersfield, examining the embodiment of ecology and disability. She holds a MA and BFA in Applied Theatre. She has presented at both ASLE USA and ALECC conferences. She facilitates workshops internationally, and has published in the Canadian Theatre Review, Phenomenology and Practice and forthcoming in the Contemporary Theatre Review, among other publications. She is also the author of Gulf Islands Alphabet (2012), In the Spirit of Homebirth (2015) and the forthcoming Off-the-Grid Kid (2015). She served six years in local politics, being the youngest woman ever elected to her post, operating under a 'green' mandate. www.bronwynpreece.com

Nicholas Foxton is a Fractional Lecturer in Humanities at Kingston University. He has worked as a mountain guide in the Greater Ranges, Wildlife Photographer, and is currently climbing the biggest trees that he can find in preparation for a canopy research project in the Peruvian Amazon (www.onetreeinabillion.com)

H3: Marine and Littoral Explorations

The Green Zone: Avant-garde Explorations of the Shoreline through a Radical Landscape Approach Veronica Fibisan (University of Sheffield)

The natural world has been shifting rapidly, triggering a wave of new poetry as a response. This paper aims to look into the way in which Harriet Tarlo, Wendy Mulford and Zoë Skoulding use fact and folklore in their work in order to portray the surrounding world. The British shoreline provides the essential space for these three poets to zonate their interactions and experiences, also acting as a vibrant and dynamic backdrop for the experimental ego to thrive. By connecting the shoreline writings of these three key female poets we can expand our understanding of the relationship between the human and non- human world and the way in which they influence one another. I shall be looking at coastal poems found mainly in Harriet Tarlo’s ‘Poems 1990-2003’ (2004), Wendy Mulford’s ‘The Land Between’ (2009) and Zoë Skoulding’s ‘Tide Tables’ (1998). The research also seeks to underline the contrasts between the terms that govern contemporary nature poetry, and the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach which hinges on the use of fact in their writing. Through inner and outer explorations of the self and the coastline, nature poetry has the potential to establish itself as a beneficial cross-cultural genre. The paper will investigate the field work done by the poets and the ways in which these exploratory acts of imaginative research raise awareness of the threats facing the British shoreline and the potential means of its preservation.

Nature’s Song: Human-Cetacean Collaborations in David Rothenberg’s Thousand Mile Song Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich (Gutenburg-Universität Mainz)

The philosopher, musician, composer, and writer David Rothenberg not only attentively listens to natura loquens and carefully observes natura agens, but he also loves to strike up conversations, and he loves to play. In a variety of artistic and academic projects, Rothenberg has used his diverse professional background to explore the shifting boundaries between nature and culture as well as between homo sapiens and nonhuman animals. For example, Rothenberg has taken his clarinet and high-tech equipment—hydrophone, headphones, amplifier, underwater speakers, and so on—to the world’s oceans and jammed with an unlikely cast of musical collaborators: sperm whales, killer whales, and other larger cetaceans. These performances across species lines, as captured in Rothenberg’s nonfiction book Thousand Mile Song and the accompanying sound recording (2008), must be partly understood in the context of several related historical processes. Historians of science such as D. Graham Burnett have identified the numerous intersections between the scientific exploration of dolphins and other marine mammals after World War II, the subsequent exploitation of these nonhuman animals by the military-industrial complex and the entertainment industry, the increasing (and certainly not accurate) perception of cetaceans as benign countercultural icons and gentle nonhuman intelligences, as well as the music of and about whales, which has been available since the late 1960s. Rothenberg, in his musical collaborations with whales, self-consciously engages with these developments and their respective histories, which both commonly and perhaps unavoidably tend to privilege the human over the nonhuman. In contrast, Thousand Mile Song notably records attempts to let the more-than-human world speak, within certain obvious limits, on its own terms, and it explores the possibilities and limits of music (very broadly defined) as a necessarily imperfect tool of interspecies communication. This paper, which will focus on Thousand Mile Song but also consider related collaborative projects, aims to combine insights from critical animal studies, ecocritical perspectives on music, environmental philosophy, as well as the history of science in order to show that in the case of Rothenberg, the phrase natura loquens, natura agens does not merely reflect the rather belated acknowledgement that there is a dynamic, material more-than-human world with considerable agency, a world that requires (at least) ethical regard and humility from humans. Here, the phrase also serves to emphasize the importance of interaction and communication between all elements of and nonhuman and human agents within the more- than-human world. Nature’s song, as recorded in Thousand Mile Song, is not a tightly scripted human solo imposed on a silent audience or played in an anthropocentric echo chamber, but a messy duet or polyphonous chorus requiring the active participation of all singers, human and nonhuman.

Ethical Changes and Ecological Crisis in The Old Shoal Xie Qun (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, P.R.)

The ecology-themed novel The Old Shoal, published in 2008 by Zhou Jianxin, relates the story about fishermen and the sea animal that took place in a small fishing village in Liaodong Peninsula of Northeastern China, starting from the 1980s to the early 21st century. Tracing the changes of life of three generations of fishermen, the novel reveals the relationship between ethical changes and ecological crisis with the changing social and economic setting. Examining the relationship between an experienced old fisherman—Old-Mast Fan, and the marine animals, I intend to analyze the ethical and ecological views of the traditional fishermen. The Confucianist ecology enables fishermen like Fan to establish a harmonious relationship with the sea and among all the villagers. In the second part, I will explore how the utilitarian turn of the society ruins the younger generation’s eco-consciousness and brings devastation to the marine animals of all kinds. Meanwhile the diminishing sea animals threaten the survival of the fishermen and ruin their fraternity. The third part will focus on Big-Shore Feng, son of a fisherman, who initiates a new mode of mariculture by establishing the beach tourism at the old shoal. The innovation not only brings revival of sea animals but also restores the fraternity of the villagers. The arguments that I want to raise is that ethics and ecology are interrelated. Excessive pursuit of wealth may destroy both man and the sea. In the tension between human’s growing need for a better life and the diminishing number of sea animals, man has to seek for a way out by restoring traditional Confucianist ecology and creating new mode of marine economy.

H3 Presenter Biographies

Veronica Fibisan

Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich

Xie Qun got her Ph.D from Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2004. Her research interest includes modern drama studies, ethical and ecological criticism, identity issues in literature, and comparative cultural studies. She has published two books and nine essays on modern drama and fiction, and has translated six English novels and literary criticism into Chinese.

H4: Cli-Fi, Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Reflections on the Potential of Climate Fiction at the Threshold of the Anthropocene Gregers Andersen (University of Copenhagen) As an increasing number of fictive depictions of anthropogenic climate change fill popular culture a reflection on what fiction can offer the contemporary cultures of climate change seems appropriate. Hence the paper will point to two functions intrinsic to what now goes under the increasingly popular term climate fiction or cli-fi. Drawing heavily on the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the paper will first state that there is a genuine need for fictions that take the new worlds made probable by climate science as their departure point, simply because fictions can help human beings cognitively adapt to new worldly conditions. Following up on Ricoeur’s remark that “the first way human beings attempt to understand and master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it”, the paper will through examples demonstrate how climate fiction functions as a laboratory where potential options and modes of existence for the future are tested. Continuing from here, the paper will then go on to explicate how the emphasis on the aforementioned cognitive function in Ricoeur’s writings often appear alongside reflections on what Ricoeur calls the productive reference or the ability of fictions to create reality. Thus the paper will point to another more utopian function of climate fiction, namely as being a place where new modes of existence appear.

Climate change and reconsidering established ways of knowing in Into the Forest and Flight Behaviour Sophia David (University of Exeter)

I examine how our current ways of knowing are confounded by climate change and suggest that both the consequences of climate change and pro-environmental behaviour require new forms of knowledge. Many of the suggested methods to mitigate climate change demand a reconceptualisation of our established ways of knowing, whether this relates to governance, economy, ideologies or perceptions of nature. I discuss the representation of these debates in Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (1996). The novel shows how, in order to survive, the two female protagonists need to adapt their thinking towards new philosophies. I demonstrate how the catastrophe (though unspecified, it is hinted to be a consequence of climate change) forces them to reconceive their existence and way of knowing. I address the effects and consequences of change in one’s environment, arguing that it impacts upon the protagonists’ way of being and drawing meaning. In order to continue living, they must find a new mode of conceiving and relating to place. In other words, we find that the encountering, conceptualisation and mitigation of climate change means we must reconfigure our epistemology and ontology. Without this crucial redefinition, so the novel suggests, we become displaced philosophically.

‘Nothing is certain and everything confused’: Environmental Apocalypse and the Limits of Knowledge in Richard Jefferies’ After London Adrian Tait (Independent Scholar)

The late nineteenth century is surprisingly well stocked with examples of utopian fiction in which the protagonist is mysteriously transported from imperfect present to future perfect. In Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), however, a gilded age of technological artifice – of ‘iron chariots’ and structures ‘lifted to the skies’ – has been overtaken by an unspecified but catastrophic ‘event’, the capital city has disappeared beneath a poisonous lake, and, amidst the confusion, society has quickly fallen ‘into barbarism’. In turn, After London has its origin in ‘The Great Snow’, an unpublished fragment in which the great city is again erased by environmental apocalypse. What both these visions have in common – apart from the relish with which they dispatch London and Londoners – is their refusal to explain themselves. By any sensible definition, therefore, neither should be included in the category of ‘cli-fi’, or fiction about climate change; yet climate change is itself a subject whose apparently simple outlines have been clouded by uncertainty (and political obfuscation), and to which our responses are, it seems, hamstrung by doubts about the effects or efficacy of almost every solution bar the most obvious (reduce emissions of greenhouse gases). In short, we live in troubled times, overshadowed by risk and uncertainty; and in that context, these early instances of fictional environmental apocalypse resonate with our own anxieties about what we know, or prefer not to know, even as we continue to assume and presume so much. This is, perhaps, an important reason to reconsider Jefferies’ work: at the very moment that Western civilisation was asserting its complete mastery of the environment, Jefferies insisted on ‘the full mystery and the depth of things’ and, by extension, their fundamental unknowability.

H4 Presenter Biographies

Gregers Andersen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He did his PhD at the same department and at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, Munich. He has published articles in several Scandinavian journals and has recently also published an article in the American journal Symplokē. He is currently working on turning his PhD Dissertation, “Climate Changed Existence and its Worlds. Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy”, into a book on ‘climate fiction’ (‘cli-fi’) i.e. fictions that use the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their plot.

Sophia David is a third year AHRC funded English PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her thesis examines environmental fiction and how it can raise consciousness about ecological issues. She completed an MSc in Geography at the University of Edinburgh and BA in English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She previously worked as a Climate campaigner for an environmental NGO. In January 2016, Sophia will be joining the Royal Society policy team.

Adrian Tate

H5: The Ecotheory Criticism Collective: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (University of Cambridge)

Presenters: Srishti Krishnamoorthy (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge/ Newnham College) is a second year doctoral candidate in English and works on sexual politics and botanical poetics in avant garde poettry by women.

Dr Drew Milne (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge / Corpus Christi) is the Judith E Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry.

Dr. Redell Olsen’s recent publications include, Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014) and Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel (Subpress 2012). ).(Reader in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London).

Eva Urban is Attachée d'Enseignement et de Recherche at the English Department, Université de Rennes 2. From September 2012 until August 2015, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She is a Postdoctoral Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge and an Associate of the Centre d'Etudes Irlandaises, Université de Rennes 2.

H6 STORIES OF CHANGE 6: Energy transition and transformation

An Energy Account for Spaceship Earth Renata Tyszczuk (University of Sheffield)

Against Capital Energy: Narratives of Social Transformation in the Work of Street Farm and Brenda Vale and Robert Vale Stephen Hunt (University of the West of England)

The Role of the Eco-Parable: Stories as Frames in Climate Change Activism Mary Kristen Layne (University of Glasgow)

Scientific and creative writing tend to be presented as disparate fields of writing. However, the use of the short, instructive narrative (in the form of a fable or case study) serves to provide a point of connection between obscure concepts and personal impacts. In environmental literature perhaps the most famous is Rachel Carson’s opening chapter of Silent Spring, “A Fable for Tomorrow.” Fables such as this are memorable and accessible, and allow for the dispersion of science communication across differing audiences. In facing the chief environmental crisis of our time, climate change, framing the crisis in the form of a narrative is essential to heighten to tangibility of the crisis at hand. Within the southern United States, climate change denial is rampant; engaging the (largely Republican and Christian) sceptic demographic is essential for promoting a move toward sustainable energy in the U.S. Utilising the rhetorical frames of the well-known New Testament parables offers a creative, effective way to express environmental concerns in a culturally conscious manner. In this paper, I consider the environmental narratives at work in religious dogma and discourse and, conversely, consider the religious narratives at work in environmental communication. I trace the use of religious narratives for other political movements, and explore the contexts in which such narratives are effective frames for environmental communication. Finally, I propose how re-storying religious and environmental narratives might be utilised for heightened climate change engagement.

H6 Presenter Biographies

Renata Tyszczuk

Stephen Hunt

Mary Kristen Layne