Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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Hannes Bergthaller (National Taipei U of Technology)
hbergtlr@ntut.edu.tw
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Rebecca Raglon (University of British Columbia)
raglon@gmail.com
From My First Summer in the Sierra to Nature Noir: Writing for the
New Post Natural Wilderness
Wilderness and the literature celebrating wild places, over the past
decade have faced numerous bold critiques, which collectively imply
that the era of “unproblematic” celebration of natural places found
in texts like John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra is passé.
Wilderness is now described as incarcerated, socially constructed,
gendered, politically fraught, and anything but pure and pristine.
But while these critiques may have helped forge a better
understanding of human interrelationships, it is less evident that
they have been successful in developing an alternative paradigm,
capable of preserving and protecting vulnerable life from continued
human intrusion and “development”. This paper examines a number of
contemporary U.S writers and their works (Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a
Cracker Childhood, Jordan Fisher Smith’s Nature Noir, Robert
Sullivan’s Meadowlands) which revivify the idea of wilderness in
unexpected places. In addition to journeying into new kinds of “wild
areas”, these writers have attempted to forge a new, tougher, less
romantic language to describe the anthropogenic nature found in over-
used parkland, junkyards, suburban back yards, and clear cuts.
Surprisingly, in the process of developing a description of a new
“post natural wilderness,” the core concerns of nineteenth and
twentieth century wilderness preservation have been both rigorously
defended and renewed.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 2
Rosemarie Rowley (Independent)
rowleyrosie@yahoo.ie
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Thorsten Päplow (Mälardalen, Sweden)
thorsten.paplow@mdh.se
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Marie Öhman. (Mälardalen, Sweden)
marie.ohman@mdh.se
The Natural Ape, or Aping the Natural: Imitation and Serious Play in
Peter Høeg´s The Woman and the Ape.
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Karin Molander Danielsson (Mälardalen, Sweden)
karin.molander.danielsson@mdh.se
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Hugh Dunkerley (Chichester)
H.Dunkerley@chi.ac.uk
In the last few years there has been a resurgence of poetry about the
natural world. Alongside books by poets such as Kathleen Jamie, the
anthologies Wild Reckoning and The Thunder Mutters have collected
more familiar poems next to new work. In this paper I will analyse
the work of a number of recent poets writing about nature in terms of
two approaches. Using the terminology of Christian mysticism, I will
show how the categories of the Positive and Negative Ways can be used
to clarify two contemporary approaches to describing the otherness of
nature. Faced with anxiety about both human domination of nature and
the restructuring of the wild by language itself, poets have adopted
different strategies. While some have reacted to the otherness of
nature by celebrating diversity, by multiplying the names, others
work by cancelling out names, by suggesting another language beyond
the human. In this second approach, there is an ascesis, a holding
back, a refusal to name when names could all too easily draw the
subject into the web of human concerns.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 7
Terry Gifford (Chichester/Alicante)
T.Gifford@chi.ac.uk
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Briar Wood (London Metropolitan)
drbriarwood@hotmail.com
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Claire Charlotte McKechnie (Edinburgh)
C.C.McKechnie@sms.ed.ac.uk
This paper explores the ways in which Edward Bulwer-Lytton made use
of amphibiousness in his gothic science fiction fantasy narrative,
The Coming Race. T. H. Huxley’s essay ‘Has a Frog a Soul, and of What
Nature is that Soul, Supposing it to Exist?’ read at the meeting of
the Metaphysical Society in November 1870, revived the experiments of
Robert Whytt and Albrecht von Haller, who, more than a hundred years
earlier, had investigated the locus of the soul in animals. The frog,
as Huxley and Mivart articulate convincingly, conflates accepted
physiological traits of life and death and blurs species boundaries
to such a large extent that it becomes a biological chimera,
something in-between, a creature that is not complete; indeed, not
intact, seemingly subject to endless evolutionary change. The frog
occupied a liminal sphere in scientific practice to some extent
because it was the most popular animal for the purposes of
vivisection, but why did the frog fascinate physiologists so much?
When Mivart suggested in his study The Common Frog in 1874 that
batrachians may hold the key to the origin of humankind, he raised a
new question about man’s place in the evolutionary scale. In his 1871
science-fiction novel, The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton anticipates
Mivart’s evolutionary theory in a rather uncanny way, and these two
instances, amongst others, demonstrate the prevalence of the frog in
Victorian popular culture and evolutionary theory.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 10
John Miller (Glasgow)
j.miller@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
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Jude Allen (Bath Spa)
judeallen1@gmail.com
My paper shall focus on two texts; David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and
Vercors’ Sylva. Both are the stories of vulpine metamorphosis, the
first from a woman, Mrs. Tebrick, into fox and the second from fox
into a young woman named Sylva. Vercors’ story is a conscious
response to Garnett’s and as such mirrors the decline from human to
animal, offering a reverse scenario.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 12
Louise Westling (Oregon)
lhwest@uoregon.edu
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Jonathan Coope (Chichester)
jonathan_coope@hotmail.com
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Rupert Hildyard (Lincoln)
rhildyard@lincoln.ac.uk
This paper seeks to make connections between these points and to use
those connections to produce an ecocritical perspective on the theory
of poetry.
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Leslie Mabon (Edinburgh)
l.j.mabon@sms.ed.ac.uk
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Lucy Mason (Edinburgh)
lucey_ma@hotmail.com
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Myshele Goldberg (Strathclyde)
myshele@gmail.com
Our perceptions of the past shape our expectations for the future,
which in turn shape our present actions. This paper examines the
mythological dimensions of activist literature, to better understand
its vision, as well as the possible futures it holds. In particular,
it questions whether the stories implicit in activist literature
match the stated goals of “the movement.” By focusing on tone as well
as content, I identify three interlocking core mythologies which were
recounted explicitly or implicitly in a selection of books identified
through an activist survey: Fall From Grace: Hierarchical cultures
have “fallen” from an ideal indigenous state, with social, economic,
and ecological conditions becoming steadily worse, eventually leading
to armageddon. Activists must prevent armageddon by creating utopia.
Entrapment: We are trapped in an oppressive cultural system, which
constricts our choices and turns circumstances to its own advantage.
Activists must either destroy the system or escape it. The Great
Battle: Activists struggle against oppressors to determine the fate
of the world. “The masses” are unaware of this struggle, but must be
saved from the oppressors and won to the side of the activists.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 18
Petra Hansson (Uppsala)
petra.hansson@did.uu.se
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Sherry Booth (Santa Clara)
sbooth@scu.edu
In his book Earth in Mind, David Orr argues that the kind of
education that has led to current ecological crises won’t solve the
problems that we face—and that our students are going to have to
solve. The question for me is not whether the apocalypse looms for
humans and many species, environmentally, but how to engage, educate,
and motivate the next generation to work toward sustainability.
My paper will examine three sites of ecocritical work, each different
from the others and requiring different approaches, both theoretical
and practical. The first site is an interdisciplinary workshop for
university faculty at our institution which has the goal of embedding
sustainability across the curriculum. For this faculty group,
ecocritical theory is largely inaccessible—and seemingly irrelevant.
But environmental education philosophy is central, a sturdy branch
that surely belongs on the ecocritical tree. The second site is the
7th floor of a residence hall full of student researchers we call
SLURPers—young (undergraduate) researchers into sustainability in
residence life. The work these students undertake crosses academic
disciplines and is grounded in basic research questions which they
design and then test. The last site directly involves the
undergraduate classroom: teaching a humanities two-course sequence,
“Nature in the Imagination.” The last location is targeted to help
students understand how we have come to the
beliefs about nature we hold, and that how we represent nature in
myth, art, and literature has large implications for the way we live
now and in the future.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 20
Sasha Matthewman (Bristol)
S.Matthewman@bris.ac.uk
The paper will focus on the ethics of teaching pessimism and despair
in relation to poetic visions of urban futures. It will draw upon
recent work in urban studies that seeks to recognise and foreground
the relations between natural processes and cultural factors, and
which suggests possible models for future sustainability. Heuristics
may be developed from these theories which are based on understanding
the city as ‘ecopolis’: an ecosystem of human, non-human, natural and
cultural forces. The paper explores how these ‘hopeful heuristics’
can inform critical readings of city poems (by poets such as
Armitage, Auden, Eliot and Fuller) which contain the possibilities
for re-visioning the city as a sustaining habitat.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 21
Chris Campbell (Queen Mary, London)
c.campbell@qmul.ac.uk
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Michael Niblett (Warwick)
M.Niblett@warwick.ac.uk
This paper will explore how the overlap between ecological and
political issues in the circum-Caribbean intersects with the
construction of a regional identity. The need for some form of
regional unity is a theme that has arisen throughout the history of
the Caribbean in connection with a desire to break the ties of
external dependency. However, in Ideology and Caribbean Integration,
Ian Boxill suggests that support for regionalism is weak due to the
lack of a coincident ideology bound to popular practices and
perceptions. This paper will examine how the environmental history
depicted by the writers Eric Walrond, Wilson Harris, and Édouard
Glissant becomes also a pan-Caribbean history, one that foregrounds
sustainable development. Not only is the landscape (and seascape)
shown to be a means of conceptualising the colonially-balkanised area
as a whole; in addition, the ‘migration’ of material relationships to
the land indicates the role of the environment as a mediating factor
that can create linkages between states, or at least between their
populations.
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Franci Bellarsi (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
fbellars@ulb.ac.be
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James Hewitson (Tennessee)
jhewitso@utk.edu
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Kelley Swain (Randolph-Macon Woman's College)
kelley.k.swain@gmail.com
The first image printed in the first English book on Sperm Whales
(Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale) is not an anatomical
diagram, but sections of the whale, divided based on where to find
the best oil. This paper looks at "early awareness and early denial"
by these naturalists of the havoc wreaked upon whale populations,
then moves to a comparison of their observations with a few sections
of Moby-Dick, where, it can be argued, Melville himself exhibits
early environmental awareness of cetaceans.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 27
Payal Taneja (Queens)
4pt1@queensu.ca
ASLE08 Edinburgh 28
Agnes S. K. Yeow (Malaya)
agnesyw@um.edu.my
ASLE08 Edinburgh 29
Sue Edney (Bath Spa)
sueedney@btinternet.com
The Radical Language of Everyday Life in Robert Burns and John Clare,
and Why We Should Still Read Thomas Carlyle for a True Sense of the
Apocalyptic.
In his essay 'signs of the Times' (1829), Thomas Carlyle wrote: 'The
time is sick and out of joint'. In 1946, George Orwell complained
about the 'slovenliness' of English, pointing out, in the manner of
Carlyle, that 'if thought corrupts language, language can also
corrupt thought'. When thought and language fail to make sense of
each other: 'the concrete melts into the abstract'. Carlyle's concern
was that there was too much emphasis on 'mechanism'. He urged his
heroes, among whom were poets, to make a difference to 'the
Mechanical Age'. I would like to examine how working class poetry of
Carlyle's period begins to construct models of identification with
place that make effective use of concrete language, especially
dialect, to express and re-vivify abstract connections. I will look
specifically at Robert Burns's poem 'To a Mouse', and John Clare's
'The Mouse's Nest' and 'The Lament of Swordy Well' to show how
everyday speech offers fresh interpretations of the balancing act
humans have to manage between concrete and abstract. The nineteenth-
century labourer's world was small; their apocalypses were also
local. Clare's distress at the loss of fields and heaths inspires a
radical language of the everyday that surpasses the merely political.
Although the time is always sick and out of joint, it's possible to
adjust the focus of our apocalyptic lens so that we can express
clearly what we really see.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 30
David Cooper (Lancaster)
d.cooper1@lancaster.ac.uk
The paper then moves on to argue that such issues, or tensions, are
foregrounded in the generically-hybrid work of Sean Borodale. The
relationships between text and mapping, and text and reader, are
explored in the book, Notes for an Atlas (2003). These preoccupations
can also be located in the earlier work, Walking to Paradise (1999),
in which Borodale conceives the Lake District landscape as a site of
spatial intertextuality. Borodale’s textual mappings expose the gap
between the phenomenological experience of place and the written
account of that spatial experience; what is more, his three-
dimensional artwork suggests a privileging of the map over text.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 31
A. Joseph McMullen (Bucknell)
ajm026@bucknell.edu
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Tracey Eve Winton (Waterloo)
traceywinton@yahoo.ca
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Hsu Li-hsin (Edinburgh)
hsulihsin@yahoo.com
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Eleni Pilla (Royal Holloway)
pillaeleni@ucy.ac.cy
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Fay Beebee (Essex)
fbeebe@essex.ac.uk
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Sharae Deckard (Warwick)
sdeckard@gmail.com
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Susie O'Brien (McMaster)
obriensu@mcmaster.ca
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Urbashi Barat (Rani Durgavati Vishwavidyalaya)
urbashi@gmail.com
Finding the way with the Hungry Tide: Wayfinding and the Ecotone in
Amitav Ghosh and Modern Bengali Literature
ASLE08 Edinburgh 39
Helena Feder (East Carolina)
federh@ecu.edu
Lewis Thomas, Glen A. Love, and others have called on the humanities
to pay attention to biology. By doing just this, by turning to
biology, we will find the broader and more nuanced notion of culture
necessary for a materialist ecological literary criticism. While the
human experience of nature is to varying degrees culturally mediated
and constructed, culture is itself a product of nature. This
realization, alive and well in the biological sciences, places human
culture firmly in the realm of nature, as one of many cultures in the
material world. Nature and other prominent journals have published
the findings of dozens of studies demonstrating that many species,
including apes, dolphins, birds, and rats, learn socially and pass on
traditions, skills, and knowledge. Writing on animal cultures in
2003, primatologist Frans de Waal exclaimed, “one cannot escape the
impression that it is an idea whose time has come.”
ASLE08 Edinburgh 40
Elizabeth Vander Meer (Edinburgh)
lizvmeer@yahoo.com
This paper will present examples of the limiting effects of the CBD’s
vocabulary on relationships between humans and nonhumans, while also
exposing the values that lie beneath understandings espoused through
the Convention’s text. I then suggest use of a different language
based on the notion of “a feeling for the organism”, which abandons
instrumental characterisations of nonhuman beings and the
objectifying collector’s gaze for characterisations based on care and
the naturalist’s relationship with subjects of study. This approach
can be found most profoundly in the scientific writings of Charles
Darwin and Barbara McClintock, as well as in a plethora of nature
writing and poetry. I focus on Darwin and McClintock because of
their importance in shaping a science that can successfully undergird
efforts to protect nonhuman organisms and allow for continuing
biodiversification.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 41
Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan)
w.wheeler@londonmet.ac.uk
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Jane Costin (Exeter)
jc313@exeter.ac.uk
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Chad Weidner (Utrecht)
c.weidner@roac.nl
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Kelly Sultzbach (Oregon)
ksultzba@uoregon.edu
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Chris Fremantle (Independent)
chris@fremantle.org
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, the eminent conceptual and
ecological artists, have prophesied environmental crisis and imagined
alternative futures since the early 70s. Their work is storytelling
for the future. Starting with the questions “How big is here?” and
“How long is now?” the Harrisons, imagine ways of living which
consider the eco-cultural wellbeing of the whole ecology. Their work
is underpinned by extensive knowledge of many disciplines. It always
involves contributions from experts and lay people. It is
underpinned by whole systems thinking, and yet operates at one level
as conversation. The Harrisons have influenced town planning policy
in Holland, and their recent work Greenhouse Britain has been funded
as part of DEFRA’s Climate Challenge Fund.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 46
Markus Poetzsch (Wilfrid Laurier)
mpoetzsch@wlu.ca
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Mary Been (Lake Superior)
mbeen@lssu.edu
ASLE08 Edinburgh 48
Wei-Yun Yang (Yuan Ze)
wyyang427@yahoo.com
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Ursula Kluwick (Berne)
ursula.kluwick@ens.unibe.ch
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Rebecca Domke (Glasgow)
r.domke.1@research.gla.ac.uk
Mary Shelley, best known for her first novel, Frankenstein - one of
the first science fiction novels- set her forth novel, The Last Man,
in the end of the 21st century. The main themes of this novel are
love, friendship and sticking together against a common foe. Shelley
tries to build a monument for her dead husband and Lord Byron. As a
result, there are hardly any science fiction elements in the novel,
except for air travel and not further specified machines that provide
for daily necessities. However, descriptions of nature and natural
catastrophes throughout the novel seem to coincide with phenomena we
are able to observe today.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 51
Katie Whitlock (California State)
klwhitlock@csuchico.edu
ASLE08 Edinburgh 52
David Ingram (Brunel)
david@ingramxx.freeserve.co.uk
ASLE08 Edinburgh 53
Melanie Jones (Glasgow)
melreneejones@gmail.com
The Organic, the Mechanical and the Radioactive: Watchmen and the
Armageddon
ASLE08 Edinburgh 54
Louisa Gairn (Edinburgh)
louisa.gairn@ed.ac.uk
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David Borthwick (Glasgow)
d.borthwick@crichton.gla.ac.uk
In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari outlines the case for a new
form of ecological awareness: ecosophy, a conception of ecology that
encompasses social and personal ecologies, a means of reuniting human
subjects with the earth, of allowing the individual to enact an
authentic process which can ‘capture existence in the very act of its
constitution, definition and deterritorialization.’ Ecosophy runs
counter to the imperatives of global capitalism which, according to
Guattari, seek to ‘capture’ the individual, interpellating him into a
state of homogeneity, a supine consumer.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 56
Martin Philip (Edinburgh/Open University)
revscool@aol.com
Buchan perceives the relationship between the human and the non-human
as a ‘joyful contention’. In Prester John the power struggles of all
human agents within the colonial context are ultimately resolved in
the common subjugation of the non-human other. In this sense, Buchan
is completely honest with regard to the exploitative nature of the
relationship between human and other – regardless of the fact that
his perception of justified exploitation is now insupportable.
Despite the shift in our moral context, we cannot dismiss the high
priority and complexity which Buchan accords to the relationship
between humanity and the natural world. Maturity, in Prester John,
is an acknowledgement of human beings as entities within the natural
world.
ASLE08 Edinburgh 57
Andrew Court (Edinburgh)
courtaj@gmail.com
ASLE08 Edinburgh 58
Erin Somerville (Reno)
erinsomerville@gmail.com
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Tom Bristow (Edinburgh)
t.bristow@sms.ed.ac.uk
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Adele Bealer (Utah)
ahbealer@msn.com
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Michael Middleton (Utah)
m.middleton@utah.edu
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Karin Filipsson (Växjö)
karin.filipsson@vxu.se
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Jody Allenrandolph (Independent)
jallenrandolph@gmail.com
ASLE08 Edinburgh 64
Stephen Wood (Liverpool John Moores)
tree-and-stars@blueyonder.co.uk
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Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa)
r.kerridge@bathspa.ac.uk
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Axel Goodbody (Bath)
mlsahg@bath.ac.uk
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Gwilym Thear (Cardiff)
ThearGT@cardiff.ac.uk
ASLE08 Edinburgh 68
Astrid Bracke (Leiden)
astridbracke@mac.com
ASLE08 Edinburgh 69
Greg Garrard (Bath Spa)
g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk
ASLE08 Edinburgh 70