Showing papers in "Green Letters in 2016"

Introduction: performance and ecology – what can theatre do?

Abstract: In the call for papers that motivated this issue of Green Letters, contributors were invited to reflect on what theatre and performance might be able to do ecologically, as opposed to what they may...

Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital, by Jason W. Moore, London and New York, Verso, 2015, vii + 316 pp., US$29.95, £19.99 (softcover), ISBN 978-1-78168-902-8

Abstract: For nearly two decades, environmental historian Jason Moore’s ‘world-ecology’ theorisation has crossed the boundaries of sociological, historical, environmental, economic and literary disciplines. ...

The Anthropocene: the human era and how it shapes our planet, by Christian Schwägerl, translated by Lucy Renner Jones, London, Synergetic Press, 2014, xii + 236 pp., £20.40 (hardback), ISBN 0-90-779154-9

Abstract: In February 2000 Paul Crutzen travelled to Cuernavaca, just outside Mexico City, for the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) annual conference. The IGBP was an international organisa...

Unsettling environments: new pastorals in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

Abstract: This paper addresses the persistence of pastoral in contemporary British writing in conjunction with classical and contemporary pastoral writing and theory The paper argues that the pastoral continues to be used to represent and reflect upon the British landscape and the relationships between people and place that it comprises in the twenty-first century However, brought into new contexts by contemporary environmental concerns, it is being put to new uses, and adapted into new forms in these instancesCritics of pastoral have been sceptical of its continuing relevance since at least the 1970s, including Raymond Williams’s critique of the social, political and ecological glosses of the ‘enamelled’ depictions of people and places in pastoral in The Country and the City and the argument against its distinction from the realities of contemporary life made by John Barrell and John Bull in The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse Whilst Leo Marx suggested in his 1992 essay ‘Does pastoralism have a future?’

Stepping outside the circle: the ecological promise of shorter working hours

Abstract: The post-work thinkers of the twenty-first century represent a valuable if often neglected critical resource. These authors imagined a social alternative in which work would no longer be a main source of income, social rights and belonging. In their putative post-work future, modern advancements in production technologies, combined with a more equal social distribution of working time, would allow everybody to enjoy more free time and lead more autonomous, less work-centred lives. This article examines the significance of post-work thought to ecological debates, suggesting that shorter working hours could form a key component of a less commodity intensive mode of social development. The article also suggests that shorter working hours could be crucial for allowing people to develop more sustainable practices and, in the process, discover new and more sublime pleasures, of the kind that can only be experienced with a wealth of free time.

Theatre and time/ecology: deceleration in Stifters Dinge and L’Effet de Serge

Abstract: This article explores the production of ‘time ecology’ in two works of postdramatic theatre: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge (2007) and Philippe Quesne’s L’Effet de Serge (2007). By focusing on the practice of deceleration, it argues that theatre’s ecological potential resides not so much in its ability to represent the world, but rather in its capacity for producing new types of temporal experience that purposefully seek to break with modernity’s regime of historicity and the accelerated rhythms that it has given rise to. Importantly, my concern with deceleration is not an argument for slowness per se; on the contrary, I am interested in highlighting the presence of multiple and interpenetrating timescales and rhythms. As well as exposing the full extent of theatre’s temporal potential, such a concern with postdramatic ‘chronographies’ offers an implicit critique of dramatic theatre’s extant practices of eco-dramaturgy that, all too often, attempt to construct a linear narrative which is invested...

Theatre, conflict and nature

Abstract: Human conflict is a raw material for theatre, and theatre is co-determinant with how conflict is known. Conflicts that are about nature, environments, elements and entities, ‘environmental conflicts’, are pervasive, intractable, characterised by uncertainty and the absence of lasting solutions. This essay proposes that the theatre imagination and praxis have the potential not to merely represent adversarial conflicts, but to show the qualities, processes and affects of conflicts. Too, ecocriticism can consider conflict as a dimension equivalent to ethics, politics and aesthetics. Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People provides an exemplar, but one which confirms the prejudices associated with environmental conflict and which ossifies the theatre imagination. Postdramatic theatre has turned away from conflict. In contrast, Moira Fradinger’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone offers a symptomatic and systemic reading informative for performance ecocriticism. Environmental conflict is a c...

André Gorz: wage labour, free time and ecological reconstruction

Abstract: Andre Gorz (1923–2007), a leading theorist of the French left, argued that the ecological reconstruction of society required a transformation of its political culture and economic basis. This case is made in his influential 1978 volume Ecology as Politics and developed in subsequent books and articles discussing the link between alienated labour, technocratic ideology and environmental destruction. His work’s critical and emancipatory vision reflects the synthesis of Marxist, existentialist and ecological elements. Gorz advocated a reduction in heteronomous labour and a corresponding expansion in the sphere of autonomy, supported by the distribution of society’s wealth among all its members in the form of a guaranteed social income. The present article (originally published in 2007 in Entropia, the theoretical and political journal of the French degrowth movement) offers a detailed account of Gorz’s work, highlighting its pertinence to ecological politics. It concludes by summarising his last writ...

Confounding ecospectations: disappointment and hope in the forest

Abstract: The task of this essay is to stage an encounter with disappointment. Though the ‘affective turn’ is manifest across many disciplines, there has been little reckoning with disappointment as a particular affect. In the overlapping contexts of environmental catastrophe and environmentally or ecologically oriented performance – where the global challenges are immense, solutions impossible, but action vital – disappointment is inevitable. It seems imperative that we begin to think through disappointment’s affective registers in order to understand where disappointment comes from and what it does. What sort of affect, or force, is disappointment? How does it work and what work does it do? Where does it go and what does it take with it? I argue that disappointment remains vital to hope. If disappointment is figured as the space created between expectation and disconfirmation, then that space in between is the necessary place of hope’s reappearance.

Projecting climate scenarios, landscaping nature, and knowing performance: on becoming performed by ecology

Abstract: Humankind is heading for an environmental crisis shot through with conundrums. The warming planet of climate science leaves most people cold. Life-saving technical wizardry is overloading Earth’s capacities. Homo sapiens’ amazing adaptations are leading to extinction. These express largely unacknowledged ‘performance compulsions’ among humans. My title indicates key vectors of those processes, each linked to different performance research eco-productions: theatre installation, site-specific spectacular, environmental maze. Drawing on Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’, Agamben’s ‘states of exception’, Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ and Sennett’s ‘Animal laborans’, this article teases out the three productions’ ecological relevance to human survival through an elementary conceit. Though we commonly consider Homo sapiens possesses an agency unique among species, it is fundamentally performed by Earth’s ecologies. So perhaps our only hope of averting planetary crisis is to begin performing exponentially more re...

The dark pastoral: Goethe and Atwood

Abstract: The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to find means of representing and analysing our fossil-fueled practices that have spread industrial particulates over the entire globe, changed the climate, and reshaped landscapes into a “new nature.” In this essay, I propose the “dark pastoral” as an analytical trope, examining two framing texts from the Anthropocene: Goethe’s landmark 1797 pastoral German epic, Hermann and Dorothea, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the first installment of her MaddAddam trilogy which ends with a surprisingly pastoral flourish. At the early phases of the Anthropocene (as it is defined by Paul Crutzen, at least), Goethe creates an epic pastoral whose materiality points darkly towards the impending modernity of capitalism. Atwood’s, postapocalyptic versions of a damaged yet rejuvenating Earth directly dramatise the Anthropocene’s destruction while ending with a “new” pastoral that relies on an almost total obliteration of humanity: these ar...

Five modes of ‘listening deeply’ to pastoral sounds

Abstract: In his Tales from Ovid Ted Hughes writes that in the Age of Gold people ‘listened deeply to the source’. This essay asks what this might mean, what modes of listening might achieve this and how we would recognise it. Beginning this discussion with a georgic folk song, which appears to be about harvest workers pastoralising their work, this essay opens up the first of five modes of listening by suggesting that there is a playful, harvest home, self-ironic listening mode at work here. Discussion moved from Andrew Marvel’s ‘The Garden’ to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Highlands’ to Keats’ ‘The Nightgale’. The final line of Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is tested with reference to a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Recent research offers examples of listening from the Hawai’an people and from Blackfeet country in Montana.

Iimbongi of the resistance: praise poets, trade unions and extractive capitalism in apartheid South Africa

Abstract: The South African labour movement of the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by the rise of a new working class poetry. Drawing on traditional literary forms, the ‘worker poets’ became a prominent voice of anti-apartheid and anti-capitalist resistance. Performed during union meetings and community gatherings, their poems encoded the experiences of black labourers and gave voice to their struggles. As union membership surged throughout the 1980s, oral poets played a pivotal role in representing an invisible working class, advancing common notions of democracy, galvanising labourers into action and promoting social cohesion in the pursuit of a common cause. In challenging the extractive theft inflicted on their communities and environments, the worker poets exemplify a version of African environmentalism that recognises the constitutive ties between capital, labour and landscape, resisting not only the exploitation of African labour under the apartheid regime but also the environmental injustice that th...

‘At my buried ear’: Seamus Heaney’s pastoral soundings

Abstract: This article takes a close look at the sounding process at work in Heaney’s pastoral poetry from an eco-critical perspective. Focusing on how Heaney relates to sonic environments in rural places, and on the way he recreates them in poetic language, it shows that Heaney’s work calls for an active form of listening. This practice, conscious of the necessity to preserve sound-troves in a way similar to archaeological finds, evolves into a poetic counterintelligence that proves the power of sound. Since Heaney defines sound as an essential element of pastoral poetry, it can be argued that his pastoral poems are sound events in their own right, meant to enter our sonic environment to educate our ears and raise questions of acoustic ecology.

Poetry, ecocriticism and labour: the work of writing and reading

Abstract: This article explores how the social and environmental critique of industrial labour found in John Ruskin’s ‘The Nature of Gothic’ might inform ecocritical approaches to creativity and making in contemporary poetry. I consider intersections between work, creativity and the environment, as they relate to the processes of writing and reading a poem. I relate Ruskin’s emphasis on the freedom of the artist, engagement with nature, and organic methods of composition, to the ways in which the modern poets W.S. Graham, Alice Oswald and Susan Stewart talk about the act of writing. I discuss how both writing and reading are emergent processes and suggest how ecocriticism might engage with this conception of the poet and the poem.

Pastoral pushback in the age of automation: US 1950s rustication narratives

Abstract: This paper documents a connection between the growth of activist environmentalism in the 1950s and the popular literature, fiction and nonfiction, which encourages or dramatizes “rustication,” deplacement to rural locations, by individuals and families. It exemplifies the portrayal of this deplacement through discussion of fictional nostalgia for environmentally undamaged living places, and then chronicling the rich literature of guidebook and memoir describing and urging movement outward, from urban to suburban to true pastoral living, and beyond.

The performance ‘apparatus’: performance and its documentation as ecological practice

Abstract: The essay re-evaluates the relationship between performance and its documentation – particularly in the form of performance scores – as a means of exploring human–non-human, and specifically human–water, interrelations. It does so through reflecting on the interplay between performance and its documentation in my ongoing project, Guddling About, which, I argue, builds on materialist and ecological tendencies in other practices and practitioners that use performance scores, such as Fluxus and Lone Twin. Using Karen Barad’s concept of the ‘apparatus’, I consider the interweaving and reconfiguring of performance and performance documentation as a paradigm that recognises and troubles the paradoxes of performance as an ecological practice, such as the inescapability of human subjectivity and the extent of more-than-human agency. The ‘apparatus’ of Guddling About, I suggest, allows space for (human) accountability in fostering attentiveness and flexibility, while acknowledging and surrendering to the u...

Glancing backwards: George Lamming, John Cowper Powys and vexed visions of labour in the capitalist world-ecology

Abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of the literary registration of the reorganisation of labour regimes at moments of ecological revolution in the work of the Barbadian author George Lamming and the English novelist John Cowper Powys. Its focus is the way in which the two novels engage with the socio-ecological upheavals of the period of the Great Slump in 1930s, and the differently inflected modernist aesthetics through which they articulate transformations in landscapes, labour and psychic structures. Drawing its theoretical co-ordinates from Jason W. Moore’s concept of world-ecology, the article examines how In the Castle of My Skin registers the crisis in the sugar frontier in the early twentieth century. Through the optic of world-ecology, a connection can be made between these transformations in the Caribbean as articulated by Lamming and contemporaneous transformations in the English landscape, registered in the limestone industry in Powys’s novel Weymouth Sands. Such transformation...

Introduction: the ecology of labour

Abstract: Some may be surprised to find a journal of ecocriticism devoting a special issue to the topic of human work. The surprise is understandable on a fairly restricted view of ecocriticism as focused on...

'Labour against wilderness' and the trouble with property beyond The Secret River

Abstract: The trouble with wilderness is well known in ecocriticism, less so are the troubles with property. To open an ecocritical path into the property question, this essay reads Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River as an allegory about property ownership in contemporary Australia. Grenville describes the protagonist’s claim to property as ‘labour against wilderness’, which invites an investigation into the conceptual correlation between land that is supposedly untouched and that which is ‘owned’. Intersecting with extant postcolonial analyses of the novel, this essay takes up its representation of the labour and violence involved in white settler claims to land in order to develop an anti-colonial and ecological critique of property. In turn, I argue that labour practices oriented towards the acquisition of property actively work against the projects of decolonisation, on the one hand, and multispecies futures, on the other. The closing section of this essay offers some paths out of the wilderne...

On creating a climate of attention: the composition of our work

Abstract: This article explores how two performance makers – Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin of the company Haranczak/Navarre – approach the rehearsal process as an ecological practice in and by itself. Drawing attention to such things as listening, openness and patience, Karen and Sophie explore how their devising strategy transcends the studio and becomes a form of relating to the world in general. Karen and Sophie illustrate their ideas by drawing on generative metaphors and by grounding their insights on their empirical experience of making Control Signal (2013) and miles & miles (2016). In the article there is an attempt to extend the dialogic nature of Haranczak/Navarre’s work into the editing process, to create, that is, an extended climate of attention.

Ecology, species and poetry of the outlying lands: a Norwegian pastoral?

Abstract: The outlying haylands and pastures were important for collecting winter fodder at the farms in Norway, almost until the end of World War II. The grass- and cottongrass-dominated rich fens, the low and tall herb grasslands and the poorer grasslands and heathlands with the hard mown mat grass were all well known to people. Poets who themselves had experienced the work in the outfields show an ecological understanding of the harvesting, the vegetation and the species found. This article discusses the ecology of poems on the subject, with emphasis on poems written by the Norwegian poets Hans Borli (1918–1989, a lumberjack) and Olav H. Hauge (1908–1994, an apple farmer). For comparison a few poems by Helge Torvund and Ellen G. Foros, post-war poets more removed from the practical experience of this work, are also presented. The findings are discussed in an ecocritical and pastoral context.

Introduction: pastoral and/as the “ecological work” of language

Abstract: In a well-known passage of his The Song of the Earth Jonathan Bate defines ecopoems as being “engage[d] imaginatively with the non-human” (Bate 2000, 199). Furthermore, Bate claims that the kind of poetic discourse that is inspired by and helps shape such an engagement is doing “ecological work” (Bate 2000, 200). The latter notion serves him as a criterion for judging the quality of ecopoetry. Accordingly, he criticizes a Gary Snyder poem (Mother Earth: Her Whales), which he sees as being overly didactic and thus lacking in poetic creativity: it “has been written as an expression of a set of opinions, not as an attempt to transform into language an experience of dwelling on the earth. (...) The language itself is not being asked to do ecological work” (Bate 2000, 200). Yet, Bate does not substantiate what he means by ecological work beyond the vaguely romantic distinction between “express[ing] a set of opinions” and rendering “an experience of dwelling on the earth.” Using very similar criteria, Terry Gifford (in an essay on “postpastoral” in Gary Snyder’s work) has defended “Mother Earth” against Bate’s criticism by underlining the richness and the self-reflexive edge of the poet’s language: “Bate and [others] fail to notice the complex nature of this poem: the way the language and forms in the poem might be deliberately raising questions about its content” (2002, 80). He insists that to be successful, an ecopoem “must work as poetry” (80). Despite their opposed appreciation of Snyder’s poem, then, Bate and Gifford agree on a crucial point: the eco in ecopoetry derives from aesthetics as much as from theme, or, in Bate’s phrase, from making language do “ecological work.” Needless to say, the debate over how to define the quality and impact of an ecopoem – or, for that matter, any other genre of green writing – is highly relevant to the discussion of pastoral. Indeed, one way forward in the criticism of pastoral today may be to consider it as a laboratory for the possibilities of literary discourse’s “ecological work.” Can pastoral in fact make language do the “ecological work” that incites readers to “engage imaginatively with the non-human”? A productive way of framing an answer would be to read the concept of “ecological work” through the lens of Timothy Morton’s theory of “ecology without nature,” that is, ecology without reference to a transcendental ideal of nature. Provocatively, can we think of pastoral “without nature” and could the “ecological work” of such writing consist in critically reflecting on the complexities and ambiguities of the concept of nature?

Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live, by Arran Stibbe, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2015, vii + 210 pp., £29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-83783-5

Abstract: Linguistics seems, at first, a limited tool to apply to the generality of problems arising from attempting to teach and encourage ecologically and environmentally engaged practices in education and...

Dancing with disaster: environmental histories, narratives, and ethics for perilous times, by Kate Rigby, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2015, x + 225 pp., $22.50 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8139-3690-1

Abstract: Reading Kate Rigby’s Dancing With Disaster one feels her experiences of the landscape of her world imbued in the pages of her book. The book was conceived, she reports, as she witnessed a ‘hurrican...

Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming, by Andreas Malm, London and New York, Verso, 2016, 488 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 13: 978-1-78478-129-3

Abstract: This impressive book speaks to several emergent areas in ecocriticism: material ecocriticism, the ubiquitous Anthropocene, environmental history, ‘Victorian Ecology’. It interestingly complements A...

Material ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2014, 376 pp., US$40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-01398-9

Abstract: In this first European anthology of materialist ecocriticism, I have found grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The optimism stems from how it reminds us that life and culture are produced by c...

Life and ecology at the summerfarms

Abstract: Seasonal dairy farming, summerfarming (Norwegian: ʻseterdriftʼ), often in the northern boreal mountain birch forests, was vital for the survival of many farms in Norway, particularly in the uplands...

Romantic things: a tree, a rock, a cloud, by Mary Jacobus, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2012, x + 221 pp., UK£35 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-226-39066-6

Abstract: From a discussion of Saunders’ story, ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil’ which Holdefer characterises as emphasising ‘the moral aspirations of language’ (279), Holdefer argues that in Saunders’ sense of ‘language as part of nature’ (281) there is a recognition of culture as nature and of nature as culture. ‘Becoming reconciled to the machine in the garden is less a matter of choice than confronting an inescapable situation’ (282). Such a statement begs a number of questions which deserve further consideration, and we should not expect Saunders’ stories to necessarily provide answers. But this final essay demonstrates the potential of the pastoral and especially the post-pastoral frame to raise difficult questions in the inquisitive hands of rigorous ecocritics. You might even have thought that no more could possibly be said about Thoreau until reading where François Specq’s distinction between pastoral and georgic leads: away from Walden Pond to a responsible sense of the ‘greater garden’ and its implications. It is disappointing that an academic publisher like Peter Lang can allow a book as useful as this one to be published without an index. But the work of this group of French researchers does indeed, as the editors hope in their Introduction, ‘provide a sense of what might be done in the future as the pastoral reinvents itself for the twenty-first century’ (14).