Katie Ritson | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (original) (raw)
Edited Journal Issue by Katie Ritson
Oxford German Studies, 2022
he contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have bee... more he contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts, from literary texts to computer games, and from Enlightenment visions of plenty to colonial justifications for famine. The range of examples shown here give some idea of the productivity of “scarcity” as a concept, and the many forms it can take in influencing and absorbing human ideas about our ways of inhabiting the world.
Books by Katie Ritson
Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the... more Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the most vulnerable in Europe. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the North Sea coasts are literary arenas in which the challenges and concerns of the Anthropocene are being played out.
This book shows how the fragile landscapes around the North Sea have served as bellwethers for environmental concern both now and in the recent past. It looks at literary sources drawn from the countries around the North Sea (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and England) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, taking them out of their established national and cultural contexts and reframing them in the light of human concern with fast-changing and hazardous environments. The six chapters serve as literary case studies that highlight memories of flood disaster and recovery, attempts to engineer the landscape into submission, perceptions of the landscape as both local and global, and the imagination of the future of our planet. This approach, which combines environmental history and ecocriticism, shows the importance of cultural artefacts in understandings of, and responses to, environmental change, and advocates for the importance of literary studies in the environmental humanities.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the Environmental Humanities, including Eco-criticism and Environmental History, as well as anyone studying literature from the Germanic philologies.
Papers by Katie Ritson
Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research, May 31, 2022
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment
Environmental and climatic change has become a... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir). El cambio climático y medioambiental se han convertido en un tema frecuente en la literatura, televisión y cine contemporáneos noruego, siendo Noruega el primer país con una organización de escritores comprometidos con la acción climática (“The Norwegian Writers' Climate Campaign,” fundada en 2013). En este artículo argumentamos que las obras de ficción noruegas sobre el cambio climático se basan en aspectos culturales e históricos específicos de la nación y/o de la cultura nórdica, dándoles una identidad particular. Nos centramos principalmente en cuatro de estos aspectos: (1) nociones de “lo nórdico”; (2) una conexión íntima (imaginada) entre lo noruego y la naturaleza, y por lo tanto, lo que a menudo es visto como elementos típicos de la identidad nacional noruega; (3) referencias a la “petro-cultura” noruega (dado que la economía noruega se basa en gran medida en la exportación de combustibles fósiles) y (4) una atmósfera de penumbra y melancolía en muchas de las obras, basada en las tradiciones de pintura y literatura nórdicas, y por lo general, característica del género de cine negro nórdico
Journal of European Landscapes
Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks is a DFG-AHRC fu... more Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks is a DFG-AHRC funded project at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich (Germany), and the University of Leeds (UK). The project focuses on three European transboundary national park areas: the Pyrenees, the Bavarian Forest and Šumava, and the Wadden Sea Biosphere Reserve. It uses comparative literature, visual ethnography and environmental history methodologies to connect insights into human culture, values, history, and behaviour that are central to humanities and social sciences research to nature conservation science and practice. It aims to foster a conservation that is more culturally aware, more aware of human behaviour and values, and more aware of the ethical complexities of its work by applying the “corridor talk” metaphor in three ways: to address and support the material ecological corridors that link protected sites; to address and support the symbolic corridors t...
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020
Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian lit... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually i...
Humanities, 2020
This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide... more This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide new axes for comparison. Roy Jacobsen’s De usynlige (The Unseen, 2013) and Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) explore subsistence lives on small islands in the northern Atlantic at different moments in the past, when inhabitants were dependent on the sea for food and transport. By looking at them together, as texts linked by their engagement with the physical world of the northern Atlantic, the two novels show how marginal populations on small islands can represent a space for the imagination of the human past and future in the Anthropocene.
Environmental Humanities, Nov 1, 2019
I n our age of shifting baselines and unstable climate, the ground beneath our feet seems unrelia... more I n our age of shifting baselines and unstable climate, the ground beneath our feet seems unreliable. Melting icecaps, tsunamis, and warming water temperatures are eating away at our ideas of stability. But in some places, the ground was never quite stable in the first place. On the seashores and on the coastal lowlands, the ground is a halfliquid, seeping, shifting edge between land and water: a mutable boundary of mud, sand, and silt. People have lived on these littorals for millennia, adapting or rebuilding their settlements along with the flux of the tides and the movements of the land. In recent centuries, human inhabitants have tried repeatedly to stabilize and expand the land by means of drainage and dikes, but rising sea levels and increasing storms are forcing a new appreciation of the dynamism of the coastal and fluvial lowlands. In his seminal "Four Theses," engaging with the idea of humanity that is in transition to the Anthropocene, Dipesh Chakrabarty charged us to "bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other:. .. deep and recorded histories"; 1 this is, above all, an appeal to the human imagination to grapple with the scale and the vocabulary of geological time. Literary texts are one way in which human imagination is exercised, as the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh recently pointed out in his book The Great Derangement. 2 Notwithstanding Ghosh's indictment of "literary fiction" 3 for its failure to engage with climate change, there is evidence that the geological forces that underwrite earth systems have been working their way into literary imaginaries. Geological instability and its implications for humanity can be tracked through the appearance in novels and prose texts of the agency of slow-moving and unbiddable silt.
Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020
Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literatur... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers' Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical features, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such features: (1) notions of "Nordicity"; (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, often seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels) , and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works, which draws on a Nordic tradition of painting and literature, and which al...
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 2021
Book chapters by Katie Ritson
Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond,... more Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnston. Readings in the Anthropocene brings together scholars from German Studies and beyond to interpret the German tradition of the last two hundred years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenge posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man, unofficially pronounced in 2000, holds that humans are becoming a geological force in shaping the Earth's future. Among the biggest challenges facing our future are climate change, accelerated species loss, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept? The essays in this volume bring German culture to bear on what it means to live in the Anthropocene from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective
Maritime Studies
This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocen... more This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocene. The concept of the Anthropocene represents a challenge to the cultural imagination, as it draws together deep, geological time, recent and current events, and long futures; the geographical and generational implications of justice; and the profound entanglement of human progress with ecological decline. We argue that the cultural landscape of the Wadden Sea is a space in which these paradoxes and connections are made visible and material. Literary and artistic works engaged with the Wadden Sea display a critical awareness of Anthropocene entanglements: in our analysis, we explore visual and textual representations of the Wadden Sea and show how it serves as a site for the imagination of the past and future of our planet.
Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, 2017
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
Oxford German Studies, 2022
he contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have bee... more he contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts, from literary texts to computer games, and from Enlightenment visions of plenty to colonial justifications for famine. The range of examples shown here give some idea of the productivity of “scarcity” as a concept, and the many forms it can take in influencing and absorbing human ideas about our ways of inhabiting the world.
Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the... more Global seawater levels are rising and the low-lying coasts of the North Sea basin are amongst the most vulnerable in Europe. In our current moment of environmental crisis, the North Sea coasts are literary arenas in which the challenges and concerns of the Anthropocene are being played out.
This book shows how the fragile landscapes around the North Sea have served as bellwethers for environmental concern both now and in the recent past. It looks at literary sources drawn from the countries around the North Sea (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and England) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, taking them out of their established national and cultural contexts and reframing them in the light of human concern with fast-changing and hazardous environments. The six chapters serve as literary case studies that highlight memories of flood disaster and recovery, attempts to engineer the landscape into submission, perceptions of the landscape as both local and global, and the imagination of the future of our planet. This approach, which combines environmental history and ecocriticism, shows the importance of cultural artefacts in understandings of, and responses to, environmental change, and advocates for the importance of literary studies in the environmental humanities.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the Environmental Humanities, including Eco-criticism and Environmental History, as well as anyone studying literature from the Germanic philologies.
Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research, May 31, 2022
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment
Environmental and climatic change has become a... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir). El cambio climático y medioambiental se han convertido en un tema frecuente en la literatura, televisión y cine contemporáneos noruego, siendo Noruega el primer país con una organización de escritores comprometidos con la acción climática (“The Norwegian Writers' Climate Campaign,” fundada en 2013). En este artículo argumentamos que las obras de ficción noruegas sobre el cambio climático se basan en aspectos culturales e históricos específicos de la nación y/o de la cultura nórdica, dándoles una identidad particular. Nos centramos principalmente en cuatro de estos aspectos: (1) nociones de “lo nórdico”; (2) una conexión íntima (imaginada) entre lo noruego y la naturaleza, y por lo tanto, lo que a menudo es visto como elementos típicos de la identidad nacional noruega; (3) referencias a la “petro-cultura” noruega (dado que la economía noruega se basa en gran medida en la exportación de combustibles fósiles) y (4) una atmósfera de penumbra y melancolía en muchas de las obras, basada en las tradiciones de pintura y literatura nórdicas, y por lo general, característica del género de cine negro nórdico
Journal of European Landscapes
Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks is a DFG-AHRC fu... more Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks is a DFG-AHRC funded project at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich (Germany), and the University of Leeds (UK). The project focuses on three European transboundary national park areas: the Pyrenees, the Bavarian Forest and Šumava, and the Wadden Sea Biosphere Reserve. It uses comparative literature, visual ethnography and environmental history methodologies to connect insights into human culture, values, history, and behaviour that are central to humanities and social sciences research to nature conservation science and practice. It aims to foster a conservation that is more culturally aware, more aware of human behaviour and values, and more aware of the ethical complexities of its work by applying the “corridor talk” metaphor in three ways: to address and support the material ecological corridors that link protected sites; to address and support the symbolic corridors t...
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020
Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian lit... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually i...
Humanities, 2020
This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide... more This paper advocates for a blue comparative literature that uses the view from the sea to provide new axes for comparison. Roy Jacobsen’s De usynlige (The Unseen, 2013) and Sarah Moss’s Night Waking (2011) explore subsistence lives on small islands in the northern Atlantic at different moments in the past, when inhabitants were dependent on the sea for food and transport. By looking at them together, as texts linked by their engagement with the physical world of the northern Atlantic, the two novels show how marginal populations on small islands can represent a space for the imagination of the human past and future in the Anthropocene.
Environmental Humanities, Nov 1, 2019
I n our age of shifting baselines and unstable climate, the ground beneath our feet seems unrelia... more I n our age of shifting baselines and unstable climate, the ground beneath our feet seems unreliable. Melting icecaps, tsunamis, and warming water temperatures are eating away at our ideas of stability. But in some places, the ground was never quite stable in the first place. On the seashores and on the coastal lowlands, the ground is a halfliquid, seeping, shifting edge between land and water: a mutable boundary of mud, sand, and silt. People have lived on these littorals for millennia, adapting or rebuilding their settlements along with the flux of the tides and the movements of the land. In recent centuries, human inhabitants have tried repeatedly to stabilize and expand the land by means of drainage and dikes, but rising sea levels and increasing storms are forcing a new appreciation of the dynamism of the coastal and fluvial lowlands. In his seminal "Four Theses," engaging with the idea of humanity that is in transition to the Anthropocene, Dipesh Chakrabarty charged us to "bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other:. .. deep and recorded histories"; 1 this is, above all, an appeal to the human imagination to grapple with the scale and the vocabulary of geological time. Literary texts are one way in which human imagination is exercised, as the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh recently pointed out in his book The Great Derangement. 2 Notwithstanding Ghosh's indictment of "literary fiction" 3 for its failure to engage with climate change, there is evidence that the geological forces that underwrite earth systems have been working their way into literary imaginaries. Geological instability and its implications for humanity can be tracked through the appearance in novels and prose texts of the agency of slow-moving and unbiddable silt.
Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020
Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literatur... more Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers' Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical features, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such features: (1) notions of "Nordicity"; (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, often seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels) , and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works, which draws on a Nordic tradition of painting and literature, and which al...
Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 2021
Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond,... more Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnston. Readings in the Anthropocene brings together scholars from German Studies and beyond to interpret the German tradition of the last two hundred years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenge posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man, unofficially pronounced in 2000, holds that humans are becoming a geological force in shaping the Earth's future. Among the biggest challenges facing our future are climate change, accelerated species loss, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept? The essays in this volume bring German culture to bear on what it means to live in the Anthropocene from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective
Maritime Studies
This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocen... more This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocene. The concept of the Anthropocene represents a challenge to the cultural imagination, as it draws together deep, geological time, recent and current events, and long futures; the geographical and generational implications of justice; and the profound entanglement of human progress with ecological decline. We argue that the cultural landscape of the Wadden Sea is a space in which these paradoxes and connections are made visible and material. Literary and artistic works engaged with the Wadden Sea display a critical awareness of Anthropocene entanglements: in our analysis, we explore visual and textual representations of the Wadden Sea and show how it serves as a site for the imagination of the past and future of our planet.
Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, 2017
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands, 2018
Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, 2018
Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond., 2017
Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond,... more Chapter in Readings in the Anthropocene The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnston. Readings in the Anthropocene brings together scholars from German Studies and beyond to interpret the German tradition of the last two hundred years from a perspective that is mindful of the challenge posed by the concept of the Anthropocene. This new age of man, unofficially pronounced in 2000, holds that humans are becoming a geological force in shaping the Earth's future. Among the biggest challenges facing our future are climate change, accelerated species loss, and a radical transformation of land use. What are the historical, philosophical, cultural, literary, and artistic responses to this new concept? The essays in this volume bring German culture to bear on what it means to live in the Anthropocene from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective
Reseña del libro: Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverance in the Ecological A... more Reseña del libro: Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverance in the Ecological Age (Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 291 pp
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2020