Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.03
Małgorzata Olsza
Narratives of the Anthropocene function in the realm of not only scientific but also popular discourses. Indeed, the most popular narratives of the Anthropocene, namely the story of the apocalypse and the story of progress, with their respective temporalities, are particularly well-represented in comics. The present article looks at the Anthropocene through the lenses of word and image, tracing the response of the medium of comics to the ongoing catastrophe, including Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette’s modern take on Swamp Thing (2019) and Richard McGuire’s Here (2014). Paying the Land is a story of the Dene people and their response to the Anthropocene. Drawing on the opposition between nature and progress, it examines whether empathy can stop capitalistic exploitation of Indigenous communities and the land which they cherish. Swamp Thing, seemingly a narrative of environmental apocalypse, also functions as a story of ecological reconciliation and regeneration. Finally, Here builds on and deconstructs the narrative of progress, demonstrating how a specific location has and will be transformed from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 CE, offering the reader/viewer a non-chronological look at environmental changes. Apart from the visions of the now and the future that these graphic narratives present, temporality coded in their “grammar” (layout, panels and gutters) is also discussed.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.28
Marta Goszczyńska
The essay analyzes Michèle Roberts’s 2012 story “On the Beach at Trouville” as an ekphrasis of Claude Monet’s early Impressionist painting, The Beach at Trouville. It first approaches the narrative though W. J. T. Mitchell’s model in which ekphrasis is understood as staging “a war of signs,” only to conclude that the dynamics between the painting and the story is too complex to be satisfactorily explained in these terms. As a result, the essay moves on to read the story as an “ekphrastic encounter” and uses Norman Bryson’s concept of the glance to account for what happens between Roberts’s text and Monet’s image. Bryson discusses the glance in opposition to the totalizing, immobile and disembodied gaze and understands it both as a way of looking and painting. The essay reveals how the glance can be used to explain important dimensions of Roberts’s ekphrastic project: its depiction of Monet’s picture as a semiotic system of arbitrary signs, its emphasis on the durational, performative aspect of painting, its insistence on the contingent nature of interpretation, and, finally, its attempts to mimic Monet’s Impressionist style. All these features, the essay argues, allow Roberts to transform her story into a dynamic scene of intermedial dialogue where word and image enter a relation of what Stephen Scobie describes as “reciprocal supplementarity.”
本文分析了米歇尔·罗伯茨2012年的故事《在特鲁维尔海滩上》，将其作为克劳德·莫奈早期印象派绘画《特鲁维尔海滩》的套语。它首先通过W. J. T. Mitchell的模型来接近叙事，在这个模型中，短语被理解为上演“一场符号的战争”，只是得出结论，绘画和故事之间的动态太复杂了，无法用这些术语来令人满意地解释。因此，这篇文章继续把这个故事当作“偶然的相遇”来读，并使用诺曼·布莱森的“一瞥”概念来解释罗伯茨的文本和莫奈的形象之间发生了什么。Bryson讨论了与整体、不动和无实体的凝视相反的目光，并将其理解为一种观看和绘画的方式。这篇文章揭示了如何用一瞥来解释罗伯茨的艺术项目的重要方面:它把莫奈的画描绘成一个任意符号的符号学系统，它强调绘画的持续、表演方面，它坚持解释的偶然性质，最后，它试图模仿莫奈的印象派风格。这篇文章认为，所有这些特点都让罗伯茨把她的故事变成了一个充满活力的中间对话场景，在这里，文字和图像进入了斯蒂芬·斯考比所说的“相互补充”的关系。
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.31
Wit Píetrzak, P. Terry
WP: To begin with, some orientation points. You were born in Belfast but have lived outside Northern Ireland for extended periods of time. How much do you feel part of the Irish literary tradition? And is a notion of tradition a relevant idea for you (especially in view of the advice the poetpilgrim receives from Dr Moss in your rendition of Dante’s Inferno: “Steer a path between the mainstream and the / Experimenters, that way nobody can claim you, // You’ll always be your own man”)?
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.06
C. Arnsperger
An awareness of deep time—both humanity’s deep past and the Earth’s deep future—and an understanding of its existential implications can significantly enhance the chances that humanity might still be able to transition towards an ecologically sustainable way of inhabiting the biosphere. This essay explains in detail why this is so, using analysis of a science fiction story that evokes existential horror at humanity’s ultimate cosmic insignificance. With the tools of “terror management theory” (a paradigm of existential thought based on the work of Ernest Becker and emphasizing the saliency of the denial of death in human motivation and behaviour) and of “existential economics” (an approach postulating that the way in which the economic system is organized and operates is crucially influenced by this widespread denial of death), the essay suggests that death denial has turned into the capitalist denial of life, and that only a deep reconciliation of humanity with its true ontological place in the universe will make it possible for us to transition towards a regenerative rather than a destructive system. This will entail new modes of human thinking, feeling, and acting anchored in a shared sense of “joyful insignificance,” as well as a renewed sense of “cosmic indigeneity”—a sense that all humans are indigenous to this planet and that this fact has major implications for how we ought to live into the deep future, anchored in our deep past.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.24
A. Wicher
In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Kurtz, of whom we do not, in fact, see much, is shown as connected with a native “sorcerer,” a “witch-man,” who had “antelope horns” on his head. Antelopes, or goats, are typical sacrificial animals, and the protagonist of this novella is a European who perishes in the midst of tropical forests, in spite of the high hopes that accompany his decision to try his luck in an exotic environment. Kurtz has promising beginnings, but later he gradually degenerates, carrying out what may be called a reversal of the ritual of initiation, comparable to the inverted ritual, to use V. Propp’s term, in folklore. In this sense, he may be regarded as a counterpoint to Conrad himself whose life can easily be described as a modern and uncommonly successful enactment of the same ritual. Meanwhile, Kurtz’s, and to a lesser extent also Marlow’s, failure as initiates is inscribed in the failure of the European civilization to construct a European empire in Africa.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.20
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, C. Arnsperger, Elizabeth A Watson
Elizabeth Watson: My original impetus came in response to a question that was posed during a class I took on “Climate Crisis and Societal Change”— the question of “Why are there so few utopian representations of the future?” As a fan of dystopian books, films and TV shows, it struck me that I had never been exposed to, nor engaged by, a utopian story. In the same class, I was introduced to Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and I immediately wondered if it had already been made into a film or TV series. I found the society described in Ecotopia to be inspiring and well thought out, but it also seemed to be one that could act as a flexible setting in which to explore the implications of systemic change. How would changing the societal and economic system of a place look not only on the institutional level, but straight down to the interpersonal, familial and personal spheres? Could systemic change go as far as modifying our own relationship to our inner world and emotions? Could healing our relationship to nature completely change our relationship to ourselves and others? It seemed to me that Callenbach was exploring this question along with others in his novel. His Ecotopian characters have a different way Text Matters, Number 12, 2022 https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.12.20
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.30
M. Cieślak
William Shakespeare, a literary and cultural icon, and his no less iconic texts continue to fuel the performance and adaptation landscape, various areas of pedagogy, and, inexhaustibly, academic criticism. Dynamically developing theoretical approaches, be it corpus linguistics, media studies, adaptation studies, or posthumanism, reach out to Shakespeare for stimulating research material, taking Shakespeare studies further into exciting and productive areas. One of the issues that keeps returning to the centre of various discourses is the question of what Shakespeare is, and how to approach, understand, and analyze this complex assemblage of meanings— the poet of Stratford-upon-Avon, the theatre person, the theatrical texts themselves, metonymically referred to by the name of the man, as well as their afterlives in print, performance, and appropriations across centuries, cultures, and media. What emerges as an intuitive answer to that question is “Shakespeare”—the Shakespeare object—easily recognizable through its numerous fragmentary landmarks. Variable Objects: and Speculative Appropriation , a collection M. and Geddes, ventures the exploration of that very concept. With its rich and stimulating interdisciplinary approach, it examines how “Shakespeare” keeps circulating in our world, but it does a lot more than discover ways to read Shakespeare’s texts anew. Recognizing “the interchangeability of humans and objects as its starting point” ( VO 2), the volume takes for granted the power of Shakespeare’s texts to generate an abundance of new ideas. What it does is to propose a focus on how fragments and objects, material and immaterial, human and non-human, rhizomatically networking away from the “Shakespeare”
威廉·莎士比亚，文学和文化的偶像，他的标志性文本继续推动着表演和改编领域，教育学的各个领域，以及无穷无尽的学术批评。动态发展的理论方法，无论是语料库语言学、媒体研究、改编研究还是后人文主义，都可以向莎士比亚寻求刺激的研究材料，将莎士比亚研究进一步带入令人兴奋和富有成效的领域。一个不断回到各种讨论中心的问题是莎士比亚是什么，以及如何接近、理解和分析这个复杂的意义组合——埃文河畔斯特拉特福的诗人，戏剧人物，戏剧文本本身，以这个人的名字转喻，以及他们在印刷、表演和跨世纪、文化和媒体的改编中留下的后遗症。对这个问题最直观的回答是“莎士比亚”——莎士比亚的作品——很容易通过它众多的碎片地标辨认出来。M.和格迪斯的作品集《可变对象:投机挪用》(Variable Objects: and Speculative Appropriation)冒险探索了这一概念。它以丰富而刺激的跨学科方法，研究了“莎士比亚”是如何在我们的世界中流传的，但它所做的远不止发现重新阅读莎士比亚文本的方法。这本书以“人与物的互换性为出发点”(VO 2)，理所当然地认为莎士比亚的文本具有产生大量新思想的力量。它所做的是提出一种关注碎片和物体，物质和非物质，人类和非人类，如何从根状网络上远离“莎士比亚”
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.04
John Michael Greer
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.02
A. Player
New Nature Writing reflects many of the anxieties which are becoming increasingly prevalent in the Anthropocene, an era which necessitates temporal leaps between the present moment, the deep past, and the deep future. Coming to contextualize our impact on the planet in the Anthropocene era in such expansive, geological terms poses profound challenges to the ways we have conventionally framed our wider place on Earth. When viewed through the lens of deep time, our impact on the planet has been comparatively brief, but we are scarcely beginning to comprehend its lasting effects. While the scale of the environmental problems we have created often seems insurmountable, this chapter argues that writing which helps us to think about deep time and acclimatizes us to its vast scale can itself serve as a way for us to grapple with the immensity of the problems we face. Through a consideration of the writing of new nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie, it looks at how their engagements with deep time challenge the feelings of helplessness that the scale of the environmental crisis can sometimes burden us with. By arguing that coming to terms with the Anthropocene is to come to terms with a changing narrative we tell ourselves about our role on the planet, it considers how New Nature Writing is playing a crucial role in this narrative shift more specifically, as it explores different ways for us to reimagine our relationship with the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene era.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.18778/2083-2931.12.17
Katarzyna Ostalska
In Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018) the theme of the novel is the forest ecosystem, with a special emphasis placed on trees, upon whose developmental model the processes of (organic and industrial) growth are scrutinized in this novel. This article examines tree-human assemblages in detail to see how they exchange their material agency and how they relate to the e/Enlightenment project. The essay also explores Powers’s novel to examine how Buddhist values of spiritual enlightenment are contextualized within European Enlightenment and how decentred humanity finds its place among other non-human beings. Apart from fictitious characters from The Overstory, the article draws upon the research of real-life scientists who inspired the creation of Powers’s protagonists: Prof. Simard and Dr. Beresford-Kroeger, along with the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing. In addition, eco-solutions concerning the tree ecosystem (i.e. bio-planning and the seed banks) coming from the scientific field and the field of literature (Powers) are examined to see if today’s progressive ideas can function in the world of the—still, to a large extent, “regressive”—structures of modernity’s legacy. I conclude by arguing that the novel shows that the Enlightenment project is not compatible with the well-being and long-term survival of both humans and non-human beings.
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