Materia Agens, Materia Loquens: Ecocriticism and the Narrative Agency of Matter (original) (raw)
Related papers
Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity
"The proliferation of studies bearing on the intellectual movement known as the "new materialisms" evinces that a material turn is becoming an important paradigm in environmental humanities. Ranging from social and science studies, feminism, to anthropology, geography, environmental philosophies and animal studies, this approach is bringing innovative ways of considering matter and material relations that, coupled with reflections on agency, text, and narrativity, are going to impact ecocriticism in an unprecedented way. In consideration of the relevance of this debate, we would like to draw for Ecozon@'s readers an introductory map of the new paradigm and introduce what can be called "material ecocriticism." We will illustrate what we consider to be its main features, situating them in the conceptual horizons of the new materialisms. From this genealogical sketch, we will examine the re-definitions of concepts like matter, agency, discursivity, and intentionality, with regard to their effects on ecocriticism and in terms of their ethical perspectives."
Anglia 2015/133.1, Special Issue "Science and Literature", 2015
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 environ- mental 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.
HEALM 2019, 2019
This paper attempts to analyze Sadanand Deshmukhs’s Marathi novel Baromaas: Twelve Enduring Months, translated by Dr. Vilas Salunke into English, using the framework of trans-corporeality and investigate how the material environment affects human bodies, the knowledge and the ethical systems, and the social practices and politics. Baromaas is a Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel of 2004 and is critically acclaimed for its realistic depiction of the current condition of Indian farming. To say that Baromaas depicts the socio-economic and psychological trials and tribulations of the farming community alone would be incomplete as it would disregard the non-human nature which is a major actant or actor in the novel and thus would be inadequate to understand the real nature of environmental issues like climate change, droughts, chemical imbalance of the soil, infertility, and genetic modification of seeds touched upon by the author. It would also be inadequate to determine the ethical responsibility for these human induced environmental harms. The novel then should be seen from the material-social-discursive perspective with a focus on trans-corporeal inter-actions or processes. When we focus on the biological or physiological responses of the human body to its environment, they “spark lines of inquiry, paths of struggle and even bodies of literature.” [1]. In a world of trans-corporeal bodies which are networked, interfacing and interacting, the human and more-than-human become co-constituted and permeable. Trans-corporeality, thus, can offer a theoretical framework to analyze the complex environmental issues which are very much real and demand new epistemologies to deal with the “entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.” [1] Key words Baromaas, material ecocriticism, transcorporeality, networked bodies, ethics, epistemology, discursive, seed freedom, risk society, collaborations.
Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter
Frame: Journal of Literary Studies 26.2 ( Ecocriticism Special Issue), 2013
"Situated in the conceptual horizons of the new materialist paradigm, material ecocriticism views matter in terms of its agentic expressions, inherent creativity, performative enactments and innate meanings. It asks us to rethink the questions of agency, creativity, imagination, and narrativity. Taking into account material-discursive practices (Karen Barad) and material-semiotic processes (Donna Haraway), material ecocriticism claims that matter is endowed with meanings and is thick with stories, manifesting as “storied matter.” In other words, there are multiple stories of cosmology, geology, history, ecology, and life embodied in every form of materiality. This essay discusses how matter and meaning coalesce in these narrative potentialities of the physical world, or “narrative agency,”a material ecocritical conceptualization of matter’s expressive capacity."
Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.
Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing Material Ecocriticism.
ISLE--Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19.3 (Summer). , 2012
In preparation of our co-edited book on Material Ecocriticism, we propose a “diptych”--a double vision of converging paths--about the key concepts of this new interpretive paradigm for ecocritical studies. The diptych provides a map of its most notable formulations (theoretical models for the intertwining of bodies, discourses, and natures), and examines the effects of the “material turn” on ecocriticism in our combined vision. Please quote my part as S. Iovino, Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing Material Ecocriticism. Part I of S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.
Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics.
In: Literature, Ecology, Ethics. Ed. Timo Müller and Michael Sauter. , 2012
Challenged by the many ways literature and art give voice to the issues of materiality and shape “narratives of matter,” this essay is an invitation to examine the effects of the “material turn” on ecocriticism. In my discourse, I argue that a re-conceptualization of materiality will enhance both ecocriticism’s epistemology and political stances, providing theoretical and practical tools for an ecological horizontalism and a cultural ethics of liberation.
Theorising Material Ecocriticism: From Abstract to Concrete
SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH
The material-turn in the millennial period brought in newer insights in the understanding of the relationship between the material and its users. It would be interesting to explore the trajectory from this point, for the New Materialism that came about was founded on drawing from multifarious disciplines – natural sciences, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, history, geology and cultural studies. Today, the theoretical framework of Ecocriticism has adopted several tenets of New Materialism and has evolved into ‘Material Ecocriticism’. The present paper aims to study the latest development of ecocriticism in association with materialism, while paying particular heed to how ‘matter’ plays a pivotal role in constructing and communicating narratives. The study also looks at reading matter as an active agent in propelling any alterations in our relationship with nature. Along with a quick rereading of William Blake’s selected poems, the study proceeds to highlight the importance of ac...
Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination
Open Cultural Studies
The New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanic...