How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature
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Christa Grewe-Volpp
Abstract
A new relationship between nature and culture as it is required by ecocritics implies a relinquishment of anthropocentrism and a revaluation of the natural environment. Contrary to the radical poststructuralist idea that there is no extratextual reality, ecocritics assume the existence of nature ‘out there’ as an autonomous agent and, at the same time, as culturally inscribed. Nature and culture are imbricated, influencing each other in multiple ways. A special challenge to environmental writers has been to explore the aesthetic possibilities of giving nature a voice, although nature is clearly different from the human, although it cannot literally speak. The following essay focuses on the concept of language and of literature as a means of communication between the human and the nonhuman from an ecocritical point of view. It will use Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams as a model text to demonstrate the aesthetic strategies of a writer who grapples with the difficulty of articulating nonhuman nature as an active agent.
© Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2006
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies
- Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf
- Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century
- Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's Early Novels in the Context of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
- Literature and Environmental Ethical Criticism: Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Texts
- How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature
- Literatur und Ökolinguistik: Anthropozentrische, anthropomorphe und physiozentrische Sprache in englischen Gedichten
- Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies
- Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf
- Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century
- Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's Early Novels in the Context of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
- Literature and Environmental Ethical Criticism: Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Texts
- How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature
- Literatur und Ökolinguistik: Anthropozentrische, anthropomorphe und physiozentrische Sprache in englischen Gedichten
- Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur
- Eingegangene Schriften
