Abstract
In the past years, the agentic and semiotic properties of material reality have been the focus of many areas of research, producing an exuberant “turn to the material” also in the debate about the humanities. This “material turn” is indeed a broad conversation across disciplines, combining physics and sociology, biology and anthropology, ontology and epistemology, feminist theories, archaeology, and geography, just to name a few. The paradigm emerging from this debate prompts not only fresh nonanthropocentric vistas, but also possible “ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world – ways that account for myriad [...] phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal and technological” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 5). The underlying task of this discourse is that of providing an onto-epistemological framework for non-dichotomous modes to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, matter and mind, nature and culture.A crossroad of scientific and humanistic research by definition, the environmental humanities is the field in which this “turn” received foremost attention. Ecocritical theory responds to this conceptual conversation by heeding material dynamics via an enlargement of its hermeneutical field of application. A material ecocriticism, in other words, investigates matter both in texts and as a text, elaborating a reflection on the way “bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). Drawing from the philosophical and scientific insights of the new materialisms, this essay explores the main points of material ecocriticism, focusing in particular on the notion of “narrative agency” and on the way interpreting “stories of matter” becomes possible as an ecocritical practice.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Literature and Science
- Articles
- Literature and Science: Introduction
- Science Studies and Literature
- Environmental Literature and the Ambiguities of Science
- Life Sciences and Life Writing
- A Feeling for Life: Biosemiotics, Autopoiesis and the Orders of Discourse
- The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and how Interpretation Works
- Quantum Physics and Literature
- ‘Secret Integrations’: Leibniz, Mathematics, and Literature
- ‘Pity Party’: Metaphors for a Banned Emotion
- ‘Primitive Purity and Shortness’: The Language of Science in Science and Literature
- The Chromosome as Concept and Metaphor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
- Reviews
- Ashby Kinch.Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Visualising the Middle Ages 9. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2013, xvi + 301 pp., 68 figures, € 136.00/$ 189.00. David Watt.The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013, xi + 258 pp., 10 figures, £ 70.00.
- Roland Weidle. Englische Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit: Eine Einführung. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 37. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013, 280 pp., € 19.95.
- Doris Feldmann and Christian Krug (eds.).Viktorianismus: Eine literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einführung. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 38. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013, 207 pp., 9 illustr., € 19.95.
- John Rodden and John Rossi.The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, xiv + 146 pp., £ 44.99 (hb)/£ 14.99 (pb).
- Susanne Peters, Klaus Stierstorfer, Dirk Vanderbeke and Laurenz Volkmann (eds.).Film. Parts I & II. Teaching Contemporary Literature and Culture 3. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, 692 pp., 74 illustr., € 32.50 (Part I), € 32.50 (Part II).
- Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, Yvonne Rosenberg and Daniel Schäbler (eds.).Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature 18. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2014, 340 pp., € 72.00/$ 96.00.
- Susanna Layh.Finstere neue Welten: Gattungsparadigmatische Transformationen der literarischen Utopie und Dystopie. Text & Theorie 13. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014, 320 pp., € 48.00.
- Roman Bartosch. EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Nature, Culture and Literature 9. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013, 315 pp., € 78.00/$ 104.00.
- Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil (eds.).Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine. American Studies – A Monograph Series 236. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013, xxxiv + 465 pp., € 56.00.
- Books Received
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Literature and Science
- Articles
- Literature and Science: Introduction
- Science Studies and Literature
- Environmental Literature and the Ambiguities of Science
- Life Sciences and Life Writing
- A Feeling for Life: Biosemiotics, Autopoiesis and the Orders of Discourse
- The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and how Interpretation Works
- Quantum Physics and Literature
- ‘Secret Integrations’: Leibniz, Mathematics, and Literature
- ‘Pity Party’: Metaphors for a Banned Emotion
- ‘Primitive Purity and Shortness’: The Language of Science in Science and Literature
- The Chromosome as Concept and Metaphor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
- Reviews
- Ashby Kinch.Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Visualising the Middle Ages 9. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2013, xvi + 301 pp., 68 figures, € 136.00/$ 189.00. David Watt.The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013, xi + 258 pp., 10 figures, £ 70.00.
- Roland Weidle. Englische Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit: Eine Einführung. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 37. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013, 280 pp., € 19.95.
- Doris Feldmann and Christian Krug (eds.).Viktorianismus: Eine literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Einführung. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 38. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2013, 207 pp., 9 illustr., € 19.95.
- John Rodden and John Rossi.The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, xiv + 146 pp., £ 44.99 (hb)/£ 14.99 (pb).
- Susanne Peters, Klaus Stierstorfer, Dirk Vanderbeke and Laurenz Volkmann (eds.).Film. Parts I & II. Teaching Contemporary Literature and Culture 3. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, 692 pp., 74 illustr., € 32.50 (Part I), € 32.50 (Part II).
- Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, Yvonne Rosenberg and Daniel Schäbler (eds.).Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature 18. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2014, 340 pp., € 72.00/$ 96.00.
- Susanna Layh.Finstere neue Welten: Gattungsparadigmatische Transformationen der literarischen Utopie und Dystopie. Text & Theorie 13. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014, 320 pp., € 48.00.
- Roman Bartosch. EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Nature, Culture and Literature 9. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2013, 315 pp., € 78.00/$ 104.00.
- Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil (eds.).Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine. American Studies – A Monograph Series 236. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013, xxxiv + 465 pp., € 56.00.
- Books Received