Atmospheric and Geological Entanglements

Atmospheric and Geological Entanglements

Atmospheric and Geological Entanglements: North American Ecopoetry and the Anthropocene Nuno Marques Department of Language Studies Umeå 2020 This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729) Dissertation for PhD © Nuno Filipe da Silva Marques ISBN: 978-91-7855-406-5 (print) ISBN: 978-91-7855-407-2 (pdf) Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 43 Cover image © André Alves [email protected] Electronic version available at: http://umu.diva-portal.org/ Printed by: CityPrint i Norr AB Umeå, Sweden 2020 “song outlasts poetry, words are breath bricks to support the guardless singing project.” (Hillman 2005) i i Acknowledgments I am grateful to the poets. Their poetry is present in me, in my body, in those around me. They transformed the way I eat, what and whom I eat or not, the way I relate to others: people, animals, things. They allowed me to translate their poems for free, they wanted to read mine. I am grateful for their generosity in working from love and not profit, for others and not selves. And for fun! I am grateful to my supervisors Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Daniel Andersson. With you I learned how to write a monograph and that is immensely valuable, for what it implies about doing research, clarifying thoughts, arguing, sharing. Thank you for your rigor, support, questioning, encouragement, availability and generosity. We were a team for these years. I am grateful to Claudia Egerer and David Farrier for supportive and enthusiastic comments to the thesis in the mid and final seminars that directed it to a new structure and a clearer focus. Thank you for your generosity. I am grateful to the Higher Literary Seminar group and their sense of horizontal hierarchy in reading and debating texts, never mind the academic position the author might have. I learned to comment without appropriating, and to collaborate through uninterested sharing. I am grateful to the entire Department of Language Studies and to Umeå University for the excellent working conditions during these past 4 years. Having a salary and social benefits to do research is a rare opportunity. The library was an incredible source of books, always available to order those I needed, managed by knowledgeable librarians. The uncomplicated approach to bureaucracy was a relief, Lenita Jensen, Magnus Nordström, Anna Wernblom, thank you! It was also because of these conditions that I learned so much. I want to acknowledge support from different institutions: the Kempe Foundation and the Nils Thuns fund to attend different conferences, workshops and seminars; the Center for Gary Snyder Studies, for invitation and support to attend the conference on ecopoetics at Changsha University, China; the Center for Global Studies at Shantou University, China, for invitation and support to attend the Biannual Symposium on Global Studies; the American Studies Group at the University of Lisboa, Portugal, for invitations to work on the Natural in Verso ecopoetry anthology as translator and poet, and to attend and organize conferences that included panels on ecocriticism; the Center for Regional Studies at the University of Madeira, Portugal, for invitation and support to co-organize and attend a Conference on Islands including a panel on ecocriticism; the Department of Letters, Arts and Communication at the University of Trás os Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal, for invitation to teach a class on ecopoetry and ecopoetics to students of the ecocriticism course; the bookstore Tigre de Papel for ii invitation for a workshop on Evelyn Reilly’s work, and the cultural association RDA—Regueirão dos Anjos, in Lisboa, Portugal, for giving me space to work in their library. I am grateful to many others: everyone at HumDok the Doctoral representative body of the Faculty of Arts where I was a member during these four years; all the other PhD students especially Ronia Anacoura, Elena Glotova and Sejla Kilim and to all the good and bad times we had together, in Umeå and Lisboa, for friendship and support. And a heartfelt embrace to Manar Halwani, Daniel Kjellander, Harini Vembar, Spoke Wintersparv, and Ekaterina Zmyvalova. To Caroline Owman for calm, focus and fun. To Virginia Langum for your support, energy and the English eye on the thesis; André Alves for the cover work, Isabel Alves who opened the way for ecocriticism in Portugal, and always points out the power of enchantment and beauty in poetry. To Margarida Vale de Gato and Edgardo Medeiros for past and future translations and work in ecopoetics. To Alejandro Urrutia y Leticia Gómez por mucho amor y amistad. Many names come here now, the reasons why each of them is here are too long to include, but everyone contributed in some way to this work: Teresa Alves, Susana Araújo, Sara At, Rute Barbedo, Lise Bardou, Sofia Bernardes, Duarte Braga, Patrícia Caraça, Teresa Cid, Inês Dias, Mário Fernandes, Luís Ferrão, Gonçalo Ferreira, Pedro Ferreira, Davide Freitas, Gradisca, Steven Hartman, Viðar Hreinsson, Emir Kilim, Karsten Krueger, Anne Leclercq, Rui Lopo, Lou, Armindo Marques, Nuno Moura, Jorge Menezes, Sanna Nilsson, Cátia Ornelas, Sophia Perdikaris, Hugo Pereira, Sandra Pereira, Peter, Vítor Pinto, Carlos Pio, Ricardo Rodrigues, Alex Romgard, Ana Salgueiro, Carlos Serra, Rosário Silva, Silvestre, Pablo De Soto, Joan Qionglin Tan, Timmy, Délio Vargas, Alexandra Vidal, Sofia Marques Voogne, Helemai Voogne, Minqin Wang, James Perrin Warren, Julianne Lutz Warren. I am grateful to all. Four years and some months have passed. Some people died: Quina and Mila, my two grandmothers. Miminho, a lazy sweet fat black cat with a spotted nose, Jorge Menezes, a poet. Some people were born: Tomás, Gonçalo, Laura and Silvestre who has learned to open doors with Miminho. Me and Rita lived in Umeå and Lisboa. We travelled to Shantou, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and New York, to Göteborg, Stockholm, and other Swedish cities. I had a major surgery. I missed Lisboa many times and missed Umeå too. Sometimes I lived alone in Umeå, spending many weekends and nights alone in the office at the Faculty of Arts. Other times Rita lived with me. We rented a room, we briefly rented a house, we rented another room, and yet another and another. We shared houses with people from different countries, each with their own particular story. We learnt together, we saw new things together, each in our way, but both enriched because together. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................. ii Abstract ............................................................................................. v Sammanfattning på svenska ............................................................ vi Introduction ...................................................................................... 1 Ecopoetry, Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics .................................................................... 10 Anthropocene Entanglements .................................................................................... 15 Atmosphere and Geology ........................................................................................... 29 I – Singing with Nature in North America ....................................... 37 Inscribing ................................................................................................................... 43 Mourning ................................................................................................................... 50 Echoing ...................................................................................................................... 69 Singing in Protest ....................................................................................................... 73 II – A Song of Ourselves .................................................................. 81 Poetics of community ................................................................................................. 84 Touching .................................................................................................................... 93 III – Atmospheres ......................................................................... 105 Cultural Atmosphere ................................................................................................ 105 The Weather ............................................................................................................. 115 Styrofoam ................................................................................................................ 124 IV – Layers ..................................................................................... 141 Social Geology .......................................................................................................... 142 Investigative Poetics................................................................................................. 150 Geological Poetics of Cascadia ................................................................................. 160 Coda .............................................................................................. 169 Works Cited ................................................................................... 181 Index .............................................................................................. 197 iv Abstract This thesis studies examples of contemporary North American ecopoetry: poems that in various ways build on, renegotiate, and offer alternatives to established cultural representations of nature and

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