Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2229035
Alexandra Campbell
From the politics of cuteness and the pluvial conditions of refuge to the ecological potency of shock and Romance, the seven essays gathered in this open edition of Green Letters incorporate a wide spectrum of methodologies and materials that strike new and at times unexpected grounds in ecocritical scholarship. While several essays in this issue build strongly upon established tranches of ecocritical thought in their examination of arboreal landscapes, biosemiotics, and historical relations between poetry and science, other articles ask us to step off the beaten track and to attune to distinctly unconventional and understudied repositories of ecological thought. Alongside the familiar ecological matter of trees, storms and cityscapes, we are invited to contemplate the mute figure of Hello Kitty and to consider the ecocritical potential of the popular Romance imaginaries of Mills & Boon. While these materials might not initially strike us as the usual fodder of environmental thought Green Letters has always been a space that seeks to foster new directions in the field, and in this issue we continue our commitment to support innovative research that shocks us out of disciplinary complacency and destabilises entrenched knowledge hierarchies. Opening this issue, Keith Moser’s article ‘A Biosemiotic Reading of J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Fiction: (Re-) Envisioning the Complexity of Other-Than-Human Semiosis and TransSpecific Communication’ provides a rich reading of the score of nonhuman melodies that mark the Nobel Laureate’s novelistic oeuvre. Where Le Clézio’s work has drawn attention from scholars for its sensuous engagement with the nonhuman world, Moser’s analysis takes us deeper into ‘a world comprised of overlapping semiotic realms’, following the threads of biosemiotic relation as they weave through an expanded web of life. Against dichotomous and hierarchical modes of thought that pit ‘the human semiotic agent against soulless automata’, Moser argues that Le Clézio’s work invites us to tune into the ‘splendor of the semiotic elemental symphony in which we are immersed’. Interrogating Western Humanist traditions that suggest only humans can ‘engage in meaningful semiosis’, Moser’s readings alight upon a dazzling range of ‘active interpreters’, including birds, trees, and bacteria, and draws out their attendant modes of sensorial and chemical communication to contest speciesist perspectives that position the human as the apex communicator. Against readings of nonhuman lives as linguistically impoverished, Moser’s argument invites us to tune into trans-species forms of communication and sense-making, and to consider the role literature plays in connecting us to the sonorous polyphony of the non-human world. The next article takes us from the hierarchies of non-human communication into the politics of cuteness in animal studies. In her piece, ‘Just a Dumb Bunny: The Conventions and Rebellions of the Cutified Feminised Animal’, Isabel Galleymore offers u
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Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2106686
E. Mason
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Pub Date : 2022-07-17DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2079545
Vanesa Roldán Romero
ABSTRACT National identities may be one of the most problematic aspects of Irish history, in part because they can hardly be detached from the symbolic instrumentalisation of more-than-human animals. In the case of ‘Irishness’, one of the animals most commonly chosen for such human purpose is the Irish horse. I contend that the horse as a symbol for the (re)negotiation of ‘Irishness’ might be spotted in Anne McCaffrey’s The Lady, set in the 1970 Ireland. Here, the author explores how the human protagonist, an Anglo-Irish girl, interacts with several equine animals and copes with the death of her first pony. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to find evidence of how horses and ponies are used to ease anxieties about hybrid identities related to humanness and Irishness, and, on the other hand, whether and to what extent the human protagonist’s accident with her pony character involves an ethical encounter with the nonhuman Other that helps her to resist anthropocentric uses of nonhuman animals.
{"title":"‘Irishness’ and the Equine Animal in Anne McCaffrey’s the Lady: A Novel","authors":"Vanesa Roldán Romero","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2079545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2079545","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT National identities may be one of the most problematic aspects of Irish history, in part because they can hardly be detached from the symbolic instrumentalisation of more-than-human animals. In the case of ‘Irishness’, one of the animals most commonly chosen for such human purpose is the Irish horse. I contend that the horse as a symbol for the (re)negotiation of ‘Irishness’ might be spotted in Anne McCaffrey’s The Lady, set in the 1970 Ireland. Here, the author explores how the human protagonist, an Anglo-Irish girl, interacts with several equine animals and copes with the death of her first pony. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to find evidence of how horses and ponies are used to ease anxieties about hybrid identities related to humanness and Irishness, and, on the other hand, whether and to what extent the human protagonist’s accident with her pony character involves an ethical encounter with the nonhuman Other that helps her to resist anthropocentric uses of nonhuman animals.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81536309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-09DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2096318
A. Johns‐Putra
This is a historicist study of Anthropocene poetics that is striking for its breadth (not just a century and a half of British blank-verse poetry from John Milton to Charlotte Smith, but a context that includes global economic and ecological systems of imperial expansion and climatic upheaval) and depth (a critical method that accounts for influences on composition and reception at once). Tobias Menely’s subject is what he calls ‘the climatological uncon-scious’ (35), the profound impact that meteorological and related physical phenomena have on the human condition, an impact that our myths of free will and self-volition, that our ideas of history as untouched by nature, have repressed; we pretend at ‘a social internality that can be conceptualised as independent of the Earth system’ (13). In advancing this, Menely is revising no less authoritative a critic than Fredric Jameson, finding that the hidden subject of historical metacommentary is not just the free market’s manipulations of human labour but the physical conditions that underwrite these. This
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2114523
Glyn Pursglove
ABSTRACT The Seventeenth Century saw several changes in how writers represented walking. Like so much else in the culture of the period, this evolution was the product of a dialogue between earlier Christian and classical models, as the inherited metaphor of the pilgrimage was replaced, first by classical models of the country-house walk and then of urban walks full of satirical observation; there also emerged largely native forms, including nocturnal ‘rambles’ in search of sexual pleasure and a distinctive revival of the Christian tradition in the meditative and visionary ‘walks’ of Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne.
{"title":"Christian and Classical Directions in English Literary Walks of the Seventeenth Century","authors":"Glyn Pursglove","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2114523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2114523","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Seventeenth Century saw several changes in how writers represented walking. Like so much else in the culture of the period, this evolution was the product of a dialogue between earlier Christian and classical models, as the inherited metaphor of the pilgrimage was replaced, first by classical models of the country-house walk and then of urban walks full of satirical observation; there also emerged largely native forms, including nocturnal ‘rambles’ in search of sexual pleasure and a distinctive revival of the Christian tradition in the meditative and visionary ‘walks’ of Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74730310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2114520
Barbara Lounder
ABSTRACT Corona Walker lived and died in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia at the end of the 19th century. Her headstone records that she died on 11 January 1889, at the age of 18 years, coincidentally less than a year before the Russian Influenza pandemic. There is no memoir, diary, obituary or other first-hand account to be found for her. Walking and writing in the neighbourhoods of her resting place is a method of simultaneously imagining the past and bringing Corona into the present. In this speculative biography, the imagined female protagonist assembles, disassemblesand reassembles as she moves through the city. This work of research creation is situated within spatial, walking-based visual arts practices and is grounded in multisensory experiences of sites, weathers and bodies. The compassionate imagining of Corona Walker affords glimpses of a future to be realised in the aftermath of tragedy.
{"title":"Being Ambulant with Corona Walker","authors":"Barbara Lounder","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2114520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2114520","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Corona Walker lived and died in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia at the end of the 19th century. Her headstone records that she died on 11 January 1889, at the age of 18 years, coincidentally less than a year before the Russian Influenza pandemic. There is no memoir, diary, obituary or other first-hand account to be found for her. Walking and writing in the neighbourhoods of her resting place is a method of simultaneously imagining the past and bringing Corona into the present. In this speculative biography, the imagined female protagonist assembles, disassemblesand reassembles as she moves through the city. This work of research creation is situated within spatial, walking-based visual arts practices and is grounded in multisensory experiences of sites, weathers and bodies. The compassionate imagining of Corona Walker affords glimpses of a future to be realised in the aftermath of tragedy.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73466751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2114521
Claire Hind, Clare Qualmann
ABSTRACT This collaboration of images and words began as an online exchange during the UK’s third lockdown period in early 2021, responding directly to the ‘New Poetics of Space’ conference . At home Hind and Qualmann pondered on a heap of words that related to the places they intended to walk as soon as the stay-at-home restrictions lifted. The words: erosion, desire, planning, plotting, fear, cold, intention, discomfort, conjuring, and sensation were prompts to think creatively and imaginatively about the sites planned for performance, as a provocation on bodies, language, and the place of women in the natural and urban environment.
{"title":"She Walked to Sculpt, Interlope, Wrap, Lick & Squeeze Into Space","authors":"Claire Hind, Clare Qualmann","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2114521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2114521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This collaboration of images and words began as an online exchange during the UK’s third lockdown period in early 2021, responding directly to the ‘New Poetics of Space’ conference . At home Hind and Qualmann pondered on a heap of words that related to the places they intended to walk as soon as the stay-at-home restrictions lifted. The words: erosion, desire, planning, plotting, fear, cold, intention, discomfort, conjuring, and sensation were prompts to think creatively and imaginatively about the sites planned for performance, as a provocation on bodies, language, and the place of women in the natural and urban environment.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87252899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2127067
Chad Bryant
ABSTRACT In 1910, Egon Erwin Kisch published the first instalment of his ‘Prague Forays’ column for Bohemia, the city’s pre-eminent German-language newspaper. The column, which ran for more than a year, launched the young writer’s literary career. This essay argues that Kisch’s ‘Prague Forays’ feuilletons, which walked his middle-class readers to down-and-out places throughout the city, can inspire us to think differently about urban encounters then and now. It probes the meanings that Kisch, a German-speaking Jew who inhabited an increasingly ‘Czech’ city, derived from his forays. It also confronts his feuilletons’ more problematic aspects, asking to what extent Kisch’s encounters with difference were ‘meaningful’, defined by humanist geographer Gill Valentine as contact that changes values and engenders a greater respect for others. How can we know if an encounter has been ‘meaningful’, and can such encounters be ‘meaningful’ for everyone involved?
{"title":"Meaningful Encounters? Egon Erwin Kisch’s ‘Prague Forays’ and Our Post-COVID World","authors":"Chad Bryant","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2022.2127067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2022.2127067","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1910, Egon Erwin Kisch published the first instalment of his ‘Prague Forays’ column for Bohemia, the city’s pre-eminent German-language newspaper. The column, which ran for more than a year, launched the young writer’s literary career. This essay argues that Kisch’s ‘Prague Forays’ feuilletons, which walked his middle-class readers to down-and-out places throughout the city, can inspire us to think differently about urban encounters then and now. It probes the meanings that Kisch, a German-speaking Jew who inhabited an increasingly ‘Czech’ city, derived from his forays. It also confronts his feuilletons’ more problematic aspects, asking to what extent Kisch’s encounters with difference were ‘meaningful’, defined by humanist geographer Gill Valentine as contact that changes values and engenders a greater respect for others. How can we know if an encounter has been ‘meaningful’, and can such encounters be ‘meaningful’ for everyone involved?","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84248130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2022.2114518
H. Billinghurst, Phil Smith
ABSTRACT In this article, we make an argument for addressing place-based narratives as ‘tissues of meaning’ rather than as discrete linearities. We look at how this allows us to skirt certain hierarchies of value in order to address narratives inclusively; tracing their continuity and morphology across literary novels, folklore records, information boards, church pamphlets and village names. Drawing examples from Crab & Bee projects including ‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ (2018–9) and ‘The Pattern’ (2020), we draw analogies between the role of sheets of fascia (gristle, jelly, fat, connective tissue, cartilage) in the human body – as a means of disrupting the assumed linearity (one step after another) of walking – and the idea of a narrative-fascia that stretches across different fields of literary production rather than a linear storyline. In conclusion, we argue for a radical inseparability of text and space and write of the need to read them both through the whole body.
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