ASLE  UKI  2015  Conference  ‘Green  Knowledge’  ABSTRACTS  AND  SPEAKER  BIOGRAPHIES  

 Plenary  Speakers  

 Louise  Westling  is  Professor  Emerita  of  English  and  Environmental  Studies  at  the  University  of  Oregon.  She  was  a  founding  member  of  the  Association  for  the  Study  of  Literature  and  Environment  and  its  President  in  1998.    Books  include  Sacred  Groves  and  Ravaged  Gardens:  The  Fiction  of  Eudora  Welty,  Carson  McCullers,  and  Flannery  O'Connor  (1985),  Eudora  Welty  (1989),  The  Green  Breast  of  the  New  World:  Landscape,  Gender,  and  American  Fiction  (1996),  and  The  Logos  of  the  Living  World:  Merleau-­‐Ponty,  Animals,  and  Language  (2014).    She  has  also  edited  two  autobiographies  and  The  Cambridge  Companion  to  Literature  and  the  Environment  (2014).    At  present  she  is  co-­‐editing  with  John  Parham  A  Cambridge  Global  History  of  Literature  and  the  Environment  (forthcoming  2016).    Ursula  K.  Heise  teaches  in  the  Department  of  English  and  at  the  Institute  of  the  Environment  and  Sustainability  at  UCLA.  She  is  a  2011  Guggenheim  Fellow  and  served  as  President  of  ASLE  (Association  for  the  Study  of  Literature  and  the  Environment)  in  2011.  Her  books  include  Chronoschisms:  Time,  Narrative,  and  Postmodernism  (Cambridge  University  Press,  1997),  Sense  of  Place  and  Sense  of  Planet:  The  Environmental  Imagination  of  the  Global  (Oxford  University  Press,  2008),  and  Nach  der  Natur:  Das  Artensterben  und  die  moderne  Kultur  (After  Nature:  Species  Extinction  and  Modern  Culture,  Suhrkamp,  2010).  She  is  editor  of  the  bookseries,  Literatures,  Cultures,  and  the  Environment  with  Palgrave-­‐Macmillan  and  co-­‐editor  of  the  series  Literature  and  Contemporary  Thought  with  Routledge.  She  is  currently  finishing  a  book  called  Where  the  Wild  Things  Used  to  Be:  Narrative,  Database,  and  Endangered  Species.    Roger  Harrabin  is  the  BBC's  Environment  Analyst.  Roger  started  his  career  at  the  Coventry  Evening  Telegraph,  and  as  a  freelance  journalist  on  Fleet  Street  before  moving  to  the  BBC  over  2  decades  ago.  He  has  since  reported  on  programmes  such  as  Panorama,  Newsnight,  Assignment,  The  Ten  O’Clock  News,  BBC  World  and  The  World  at  One.    Many  of  today’s  environment/equity  themes  became  issues  of  public  concern  following  Roger’s  reports  on  Radio  4’s  “Today”  programme.  They  include  climate  change,  biodiversity,  carbon  footprints,  population,  over-­‐fishing,  green  taxation,  road  pricing,  global  inter-­‐connectedness,  3rd  World  debt,  and  many  more.  His  interests  cover  policy  on  the  environment,  transport,  energy,  development,  public  health  and  economics,  particularly  where  these  areas  overlap.    Roger  has  undertaken  many  acclaimed  interviews  on  environmental  issues  with  many  key  figures  including  Ban  Ki  Moon,  President  Barroso,  Tony  Blair,  John  Kerry  and  Al  Gore.  He  is  a  graduate  of  St  Catharine’s  College  Cambridge,  and  has  spent  academic  sabbaticals  at  Green  College  Oxford  and  Wolfson  College  Cambridge,  where  he  is  an  Associate  Press  Fellow.  He  co-­‐directs  the  Cambridge  Environment  and  Media  Programme,  which  brings  together  senior  journalists  and  outside  experts  to  discuss  media  coverage  of  long-­‐term  sustainable  development  issues.  

 Presentations  and  Readings  

 Ann  Fisher-­‐Wirth’s  fourth  book  of  poems,  Dream  Cabinet,  was  published  by  Wings  Press  in  2012.  Her  other  books  of  poems  are  Carta  Marina,  Blue  Window,  and  Five  Terraces.  With  

Laura-­‐Gray  Street,  she  coedited  the  groundbreaking  Ecopoetry  Anthology,  published  by  Trinity  University  Press  in  2013.    Her  poems  appear  widely  and  have  received  numerous  awards,  including  a  Malahat  Review  Long  Poem  Prize,  the  Rita  Dove  Poetry  Award,  the  Mississippi  Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters  Poetry  Award,  two  Mississippi  Arts  Commission  fellowships,  and  thirteen  Pushcart  nominations  including  a  Special  Mention.    Ann  has  held  a  senior  Fulbright  in  Fribourg,  Switzerland,  and  the  Fulbright  Distinguished  Chair  in  Uppsala,  Sweden.  She  has  served  as  President  of  ASLE  and  has  recently  been  named  a  Fellow  2015-­‐2018  of  the  Black  Earth  Institute,  an  organization  dedicated  to  the  arts,  to  social  and  environmental  justice,  and  to  matters  of  the  spirit.  Her  current  project  is  a  collaborative  poetry/photography  manuscript  called  Mississippi  with  the  acclaimed  photographer  Maude  Schuyler  Clay.  She  teaches  at  the  University  of  Mississippi,  where  she  also  directs  the  minor  in  Environmental  Studies.  And  she  teaches  yoga  at  Southern  Star  Yoga  Studio  in  Oxford,  MS.    Marlene  Creates  joins  us  to  screen  her  film  From  the  Ground  Tier  to  a  Sparrow  Batch:  a  Newfoundland  Treasury  of  Terms  for  Ice  and  Snow,  Blast  Hole  Pond  River,  Winter  2012-­‐2013.  Her  theoretical  and  studio  research  interests  include  photography,  ecology,  poetry,  and  place.  Since  2002  her  principal  artistic  venture  has  been  to  closely  observe  and  work  with  one  particular  place  —  the  six  acres  of  boreal  forest  that  she  inhabits  in  Portugal  Cove,  Newfoundland,  Canada.  

Her  artwork,  spanning  more  than  three  decades,  has  been  an  exploration  of  the  relationship  between  human  experience,  memory,  language  and  the  land,  and  the  impact  they  have  on  each  other.  Since  the  1970s  her  work  has  been  presented  in  over  300  solo  and  group  exhibitions  across  Canada  and  in  Ireland,  Scotland,  England,  France,  Denmark,  the  USA,  and  China.  

She  has  also  been  the  curator  of  several  nationally  touring  exhibitions,  worked  in  artist-­‐run  centres,  and  taught  visual  arts  at  the  University  of  Ottawa,  Algonquin  College,  and  the  Nova  Scotia  College  of  Art  &  Design.  Her  video-­‐poems  have  been  included  in  national  exhibitions  and  screened  at  The  Voice:  VISIBLE  VERSE  Videopoetry  Festival  in  Vancouver,  the  St.  John’s  International  Women’s  Film  Festival,  and  the  ViDEOTExT  Festival  in  Bramberg,  Austria.  

In  2001  she  was  elected  to  the  Royal  Canadian  Academy  of  Arts.  Among  the  awards  she  has  received  are  the  Artist  of  the  Year  award  from  the  Newfoundland  &  Labrador  Arts  Council  (1996),  The  Long  Haul  Award  for  Excellence  in  the  Visual  Arts  from  VANL-­‐CARFAC  (2009),  the  CARFAC  National  Visual  Arts  Advocate  Award  (2009),  and  a  Government  of  Newfoundland  &  Labrador  Arts  and  Letters  Award  for  poetry  (2010).  Recent  awards  include  the  2013  BMW  Exhibition  Prize  at  the  Scotiabank  Contact  Photography  Festival  in  Toronto,  and  the  Grand  Jury  Award  at  the  2014  Yosemite  International  Film  Festival.  www.marlenecreates.ca      

Panel  Abstracts  and  Speaker  Biographies    

Panel  Session  A:  Wednesday  2nd  September  1.15pm  –  2.45pm    A1:  Towards  an  ecological  understanding  of  collaborative  practices  with  and  between  art  and  poetry,  place  and  landscape  I    If  you  are  that  place:  poetry,  painting  and  land  Harriet  Tarlo  (Sheffield  Hallam  University)  and  Judith  Tucker  (University  of  Leeds)    Poet,  Harriet  Tarlo,  and  artist,  Judith  Tucker,  have  walked  and  worked  together  since  2011  

on  “Tributaries”  (W.  Yorks)  and  “Excavations  and  Estuaries”  (the  Humber).  They  continue  to  talk  and  make  work  about  these  now  much-­‐visited  places  including  drawings,  paintings  and  poems  conveyed  to  the  public  through  exhibitions,  readings,  papers  and  artists’  books,  all  of  which  inter-­‐relate  in  an  open  flux.  Defying  obvious  boundaries  and  binary  ways  of  thinking  about  art  and  poetry,  this  paper  will  reflect  on  the  ecocritical  and  ecopoetic  possibilities  of  all  these  collaborative,  cross-­‐disciplinary  practices  from  the  original  walks  and  conversations  to  the  production  and  exhibition  of  the  work.  They  consider  how  collaborative  practice  explores  place  through  writing  as  painting  and  painting  as  writing,  considering  the  processes  and  materials  involved  in  painting,  drawing  and  writing  as  well  as  viewing  and  reading.  In  particular,  they  explore  the  line,  lines  being  a  crucial  constituent  of  mapping,  drawing,  painting  and  poetry  and  key  to  how  we  reflect  on  and  in  place.  Drawing  on  the  new  materialist  notions  of  thing-­‐power  and  of  strategic  anthropomorphism  in  relation  to  avant-­‐garde  practices  from  the  mid  twentieth  century,  they  consider  how  and  whether  inter-­‐disciplinary  collaborative  practice  might  be  a  means  to  explore  more  open,  environmentally  aware  engagements  with  landscape  and  place,  a  greater  understanding  of  the  “naturalcultural”  nexus  (Haraway).    Vibrant  Spaces:  A  Thin  Place  Dialogue  Ciara  Healy  and  Mary  Modeen    This  joint  collaborative  presentation  with  accompanying  images  emerged  out  of  a  correspondence  between  Ciara  Healy  (University  of  Reading)  and  Mary  Modeen  (University  of  Dundee).  Both  as  artist/curators  and  academics,  they  attend  to  ecological/environmental  ways  of  knowing:  in  scientific,  cultural,  metaphysical,  and  religious  modes.  Thin  Place  was  the  title  of  an  interdisciplinary  curatorial  project  at  Oriel  Myrddin,  Carmarthen,  developed  by  Ciara  in  early  2015,  which  aimed  to  find  connections  among  making,  actions,  materials  and  study.  The  nature  of  the  curatorial  project  went  beyond  the  single  exhibition  in  Wales,  incorporating  a  symposium,  catalogue  and  education  programme  that  dissolved  boundaries  between  separate  fields  of  knowledge  and,  in  so  doing,  attempted  to  create  a  metaphysical  thin  place  within  the  gallery.  A  written  and  visual  dialogue  between  the  presenters  preceded  what  began  as  this  place-­‐based  curatorial  project,  based  on  emergent  ideas  in  eco-­‐criticism,  eco-­‐feminism,  post-­‐  and  new  materialism.  Coinciding  with  this  research,  Mary  led  a  recent  Vibrant  Matters  conference  (Dundee,  Jan.  2015),  furthering  this  vital  materialist  interdisciplinary  discourse  through  the  participation  of  two  research  networks.      In  ancient  times  it  was  believed  that  the  delineation  between  worlds  was  more  permeable  in  certain  anomalous  areas  in  a  landscape;  thin  places  were  sometimes  signified  by  burial  mounds  or  standing  stones.  In  building  upon  this  notion  of  a  ‘thin  place’,  this  joint  presentation  poetically  addresses  ways  in  which  we  value  our  relationship  with  Place(s),  particularly  in  landscapes  where  human  and  non-­‐human  relationships  were  once  well  established,  and  where  ambiguities  in  traversing  liminal  spaces  were  embraced,  anticipating  future  vibrant  ecologies.    Presenter  Biographies    Harriet  Tarlo  is  a  poet  and  academic.  Publications  include  Poems  1990-­‐2003  (Shearsman  2004),  Nab  (etruscan  2005),  Poems  2004-­‐2014  (Shearsman,  forthcoming  2015)  and,  with  Judith  Tucker,  Sound  Unseen    (Wild  Pansy,  2013)  and  Behind  Land  (Wild  Pansy,  forthcoming  2015).  She  edited  She  edited  a  special  feature  on  “Women  and  Eco-­‐Poetics”  for  How2  Vol  3:  No  2  as  well  as  The  Ground  Aslant:  An  Anthology  of  Radical  Landscape  Poetry  (Shearsman,  2011).  Exhibitions  of  texts  in  collaboration  with  artist,  Jem  Southam  and  Judith  Tucker,  have  

appeared  widely,  including  at  The  Lowry,  Salford,  Tullie  House,  Carlisle;  Musee  de  Moulages,  Lyon  and  The  University  of  Minneapolis.  Her  academic  work  appears  in  critical  volumes  published  by  Edinburgh  University  Press,  Salt,  Palgrave,  Rodopi  and  Bloodaxe.  Recent  critical  and  creative  work  appears  in  Pilot,  Jacket,  Rampike,  English,  Classical  Receptions  and  the  Journal  of  Ecocriticism  (JoE).  She  is  Course  Leader  for  the  long-­‐established  M.A.  Writing  at  Sheffield  Hallam  University.    Judith  Tucker  is  an  artist  who  considers  place  through  drawing  and  painting.  She  has  exhibited  extensively  both  in  the  UK  and  abroad.    Recent  exhibition  venues  are  very  wide  ranging  and  include  Lyon,  France;  Brno,  Czech  Republic;  Minneapolis  and  Virginia,  USA.    In  addition  to  working  in  her  studio  Judith  is  an  academic  working  at  the  University  of  Leeds  specialising  in  practice-­‐led  research.  She  is  co-­‐convenor  of  two  place  –based  networks  Land2  and  Mapping  Spectral  Traces.  She  has  recently  been  invited  to  be  one  of  the  artists  in  Contemporary  British  Painting  and  through  this  group  is  involved  in  exhibitions  at  Huddersfield,  Ipswich  and  London  (forthcoming).  Judith  Tucker  also  writes  academic  essays  which  can  be  found  in  academic  journals  and  in  books  published  by  Rodopi,  Macmillan  ,  Intellect  and  Gunter  Narrverlag,  Tübingen.  She  is  writing  a  jointly  authored  chapter  with  Tarlo  for  a  volume  on  Extending  Ecocriticism  eds  Welstead  and  Barry,  MUP  (forthcoming).    Ciara  Healy  is  a  Lecturer  and  Senior  Tutor  in  Art  at  University  of  Reading  where  she  supervises  undergraduate  and  postgraduate  students  in  Studio  Practice  and  Critical  Theory.  Her  teaching  is  informed  by  her  Doctorate  research  into  Place-­‐based  curating,  critical  writing  and  Book  Arts.  She  is  the  2011  recipient  of  the  WAI  &  Axis  Critical  Writing  Award,  a  former  Curatorial  Fellow  of  the  Lewis  Glucksman  Gallery,  and  she  has  published  essays  in  Art  Review,  This  is  Tomorrow  &  Circa.  www.ciarahealy.com    Mary  Modeen  is  Founder  and  Course  Director  for  the  MFA  in  Art  &  Humanities  at  Duncan  of  Jordanstone  College  of  Art  and  Design,  University  of  Dundee,  Scotland  where  interdisciplinary  investigations  between  creative  praxis  and  academic  study  are  common  to  all  students.  She  also  supervises  PhD  candidates  who  similarly  combine  areas  of  art  and  humanities  studies,  and  she  is  Co-­‐Director  of  Research  Degrees  and  PhD  Studies  for  DJCAD.  Most  often  in  her  research,  she  combines  a  creative  practice  and  writing.  www.marymodeen.com    A2:  Biopolitics,  Ancient,  Modern  and  Postmodern    Magic  and  Science  as  Power-­‐Thought  in  Empedocles  Richard  Hutchins  (Princeton)    Bertrand  Russell  once  described  scientific  thought  as,  “essentially  power-­‐thought—the  sort  of  thought,  that  is  to  say,  whose  purpose,  conscious  or  unconscious,  is  to  give  power  to  its  possessor.”1  Taking  a  cue  from  Russell,  this  paper  presents  what  I  claim  to  be  the  first  instance  in  Greek  literature  where  an  author  tells  us  his  motive  for  knowing  nature:  fragment  B111  of  the  poem  On  Nature  by  the  5th  century  BCE  Presocratic  poet  Empedocles.  Traditionally  printed  as  the  conclusion  to  his  On  Nature,  Empedocles  B111  promises  the  poem’s  addressee  that  if  he  understands  Empedocles  inquiry  into  nature,  he  will  have  magical  powers  over  wind,  rain,  drought,  agriculture,  sickness,  and  even  death.2  To  help  

1 Russell, Bertrand. The Scientific Outlook. London: Routledge Classics, [1931] 2009, pg. 57. 2 Empedocles B111, my translation from the standard source text, Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker, Hermann Diels & Walther Kranz, reprint 6th edition, Berlin: Weidmann, [1903] 1992, Vol. 1, pg. 353-4. This standard edition of the text prints Empedocles B111 as the conclusion to his poem On Nature, or Peri\ Fu/sewj: “And all the medicines that there are as a defense against sufferings and old age/you

trace  this  genealogy,  I  consider  a  few  texts  that  precede  Empedocles:  Homer’s  Odyssey  10.302-­‐306,  the  first  instance  of  the  word  “nature”  (ϕυσις)  in  Greek;  and  two  anecdotes  about  the  Presocratic  philosopher  Thales  of  Miletus.  While  neither  expresses  a  motive  for  knowing  nature,  they  show  that  in  our  earliest  Greek  texts,  knowledge  of  nature  was  described  as  in  close  association  with  the  instrumentalization  and  magical  control  of  it.  The  idea  that  knowledge  of  nature  is  for  its  own  sake  is  a  later  Greek  idea,  and  if  you  believe  Russell,  has  always  been  the  weaker  motivation  in  the  history  of  science.  In  presenting  the  knowledge  of  nature  so  directly  as  magical  control  for  human  ends,  Empedocles  deserves  a  place  in  the  genealogy  and  critique  of  the  historical  frameworks  that  are  the  foundations  of  the  present  biopolitical,  anthropocentric,  and  toxically  magical  environmental  crisis.    Virgil’s  wheel  –  a  rereading  of  a  rhetorical  conception  on  environing  Aslaug  Nyrnes  (Bergen  University  College)    The  close  connection  between  language  and  landscape  is  a  core  perspective  in  classical  rhetoric.  In  the  rhetorical  tradition  using  language  is  often  conceptualized  as  moving  around  in  a  garden  or  in  different  landscape  formations,  where  the  tasks  of  speaking,  reading  and  writing  are  a  question  of  being  able  to  orientate  oneself  in  different  kinds  of  environments.  This  connection  of  language  and  landscape  is  distinctively  formulated  in  the  figure  called  Virgil’s  wheel.    The  Virgil’s  wheel  (from  John  of  Garlands  Parisiana  poetria  ca  1240)  is  a  reading  of  Virgil  (70-­‐19  BC),  and  has  to  be  understood  as  part  of  the  history  of  the  reception  of  Virgil.  Virgil’s  three  poetic  texts  Bucolica,  Georgica  and  Æneiden  are  representations  on  nature  canonized  as  examples  of  the  pastoral,  didactic  and  epic  poem  traditions,  and  the  wheel  is  a  reading  of  these  texts  designed  as  “a  memory  grid”  of  concentric  circles,  each  sector  of  the  circle  combining  literary  style  and  landscape-­‐  and  culture  formations.    “Texts  reiterate  established  protocols  of  environing,  but  in  doing  so  they  also  expose  them  to  our  scrutiny  and  make  it  possible  for  us  to  imagine  alternatives”,  as  it  is  pinpointed  in  an  article  in  Environmental  Humanities  (Bergthaller  et  al  2014,  272).  The  aim  of  this  paper  is  to  reread  the  figure  Virgil’s  wheel,  and  discuss  it  as  an  early  practice  of  environing.  Through  the  discussion  of  the  ancient  figure  I  will  confront  contemporary  figures  of  nature  representation.    ‘I  Grew  like  Corn’:  Thoreau’s  Vegetal  Life  and  Merleau-­‐Ponty’s  Flesh  Su  Chiu-­‐Hua  (Soochow  University)    In  Walden,  Henry  David  Thoreau’s  descriptions  of  the  non-­‐human  others  reveal  his  peculiar  notion  of  the  world  which  subverts  scientific  taxonomy:  the  earth  was  covered  with  “papillæ,”  the  hawk’s  circle  in  the  sky  embodied  his  thought;  the  ice  “honey-­‐combed”  in  spring;  his  body  “grew.  .  .  like  corn”  in  summer.    As  one  of  the  most  mysterious  passages  in  “Spring”  shows,  “The  Maker  of  this  earth  but  patented  a  leaf.”    Pondering  over  the  foliaceous  pattern  manifest  on  the  sandy  hill  as  the  frozen  clay  was  melting  in  spring,  Thoreau  portrayed  the  formation  of  worldly  things  -­‐-­‐plants,  animals,  rocks,  human  body-­‐-­‐  as  the  result  of  unceasing  labor  of  intertwining,  weaving,  folding,  and  imbricating.    In  this  essay,  I  would  like  to  show  that  Thoreau’s  endeavors  to  blur  the  distinctions  between  the  organic/inorganic,  animal/plant,  matter/spirit  not  only  challenge  the  traditional  ontology  

shall learn, since for you alone will I accomplish all these things./ And you shall stop the force of the tireless winds which on earth/blowing in gusts destroy the farmer’s field./And again, if you wish, you shall stir up winds as requital;/And you shall produce from black rain timely drought/for human beings, and you shall produce from summer drought/tree-nourishing streams, which will flow through the upper air,/and you shall bring back from Hades the life-force of a dead man.”

that  treats  things  as  static  entities  but  also  put  the  idea  of  “life”  into  question.    To  strengthen  my  argument,  I  would  like  to  draw  Thoreau  and  Merleau-­‐Ponty  into  dialogue.    In  the  unfinished  project  of  “Intertwining—the  Chiasm,”  Merleau-­‐Ponty  attempted  to  advance  a  notion  that  has  not  been  thought  of  in  traditional  philosophy,  “flesh.”    As  the  “incarnate  principle,”  flesh  “makes  the  fact  be  a  fact”  by  the  work  of  “interweaving,”  “enfolding,”  and  “crisscrossing.”    Hence,  the  seer  is  embodied  in  the  thickness  of  the  world  and  there  is  a  “kinship”  between  the  seer  and  the  visibles.    Despite  the  fact  that  Merleau-­‐Ponty’s  indebtedness  to  biology  has  been  well  studied  in  recent  years,  I  would  try  to  broaden  the  scope  of  flesh  by  starting  to  investigate  its  vegetal  metaphors,  such  as,  the  body  is  “a  being  of  two  leaves,”  the  kinship  between  the  seer  and  the  visibles  resembles  “two  halves  of  oranges,”  and  vision  occurs  at  the  “dehiscence”  of  world’s  Flesh.    Hopefully,  the  confluence  of  Merleau-­‐Ponty  and  Thoreau  would  provide  a  fertile  ground  for  the  idea  of  “vegetal  life”  to  grow.    I  will  try  to  argue  that  “vegetal  life”,  serving  as  the  under-­‐lining  of  all  things,  organic  or  inorganic,  has  a  strong  potential  in  making  significant  contributions  to  the  contemporary  reflections  upon  biopolitics  and  its  ethics.    A2  Presenter  Biographies    Richard  Hutchins      Aslaug  Nyrnes  is  a  professor  at  Bergen  University  College,  Norway.  Her  most  recent  publications  are  “Om  ikkje  anna  må  det  vere  setningar  der  –  Odda  bibliotek  og  det  litterære  Odda”  (in  print,  2015,  “If  nothing  else  there  ought  to  be  sentences  there  –  The  Library  of  Odda  and  Odda  as  a  literary  place”),  “The  Series  –  Serial  work  in  artistic  research  and  in  the  didactics  of  the  arts”  (2013,  InFormation),  “Kunnskapstopologi”  (2012,  The  topology  of  knowledge”,  Kunnskapens  språk.  Skrivearbeid  som  forskningsmetode).    Su  Chiu-­‐Hua  is  an  associate  professor  in  the  English  Department  at  Soochow  University,  Taiwan.    Her  study  interests  include:  phenomenology,  animal  studies,  magic  studies,  and  posthumanism.    A3:  Pathways  to  Understanding  Climate  Change    Barbara  Bodenhorn  has  been  working  in  the  Alaskan  Arctic  since  1980  and  in  the  Sierra  Norte  of  Oaxaca,  Mexico  since  2004.  Her  interest  in  environmental  knowledge  and  how  it  is  learned  stems  from  the  mid-­‐1990s.  She  is  currently  a  Senior  Research  Associate  with  the  Department  of  Social  Anthropology  and  a  Fellow  Emerita  at  Pembroke  College,  Cambridge.    Elsa  Lee  is  a  postdoctoral  researcher  at  the  University  of  Cambridge,  Faculty  of  Education,  working  on  an  interdisciplinary  AHRC  funded  projec.  Elsa  has  a  long-­‐held  interest  in  environmental  education  and  children's  participation.    She  has  taught  Biology  in  secondary  schools  in  both  England  and  Mexico.  The  focus  of  her  doctoral  study  at  the  University  of  Bath  was  children's  appropriation  of  active  citizenship  attributes  through  participation  in  primary  school  eco-­‐clubs.    Tom  Moorhouse  is  a  strange  hybrid  being,  half  children's  author  and  half  research  ecologist  (an  entity  probably  not  called  an  "authologist").  His  debut  novel  The  River  Singers  was  nominated  for  the  2015  Carnegie  Medal  and  longlisted  for  the  2015  UKLA  and  2014  Branford  Boase  awards,  and  follows  the  adventures  of  a  family  of  water  voles  as  they  battle  to  escape  a  new  and  terrible  enemy.  Its  sequel  The  Rising  sees  the  voles  facing  their  most  dangerous  enemy  of  all:  the  Great  River  herself.    He  works  for  Oxford  University,  writes  for  himself  and  

is  published  by  Oxford  University  Press.  His  books  have  so  far  been  translated  into  six  languages.    David  Whitley  is  a  lecturer  in  the  Faculty  of  Education  at  Cambridge  University,  where  he  teaches  film,  poetry  and  children’s  literature.  He  is  particularly  interested  in  the  way  the  arts,  especially  poetry  and  film,  offer  different  forms  of  understanding  and  engagement  with  the  natural  world.  His  most  recent  book  is  The  Idea  of  Nature  in  Disney  Animation:  from  Snow  White  to  WALL•E    (2012).    A4:  Creaturely  Lives  and  Liminal  Knowledges    Cryptozoology  and  the  Creatures  of  the  Deep  John  Miller  (University  of  Sheffield)    The   Belgian   natural   historian   Bernard   Heuvelmans   (1916-­‐2001)   was   a   man   with   an  unconventional  array  of  interests.  Completing  a  PhD  in  the  classification  of  aardvark  teeth  at  the   Free  University   of   Brussels   in   1939,   he   escaped   four   times   from  Nazi   prisoner   of  war  camps  to  make  an  unlikely   living  as  a  stand-­‐up  comedian  and   jazz  singer   in  post-­‐war  Paris.  But   it   was   his   contribution   to   an   esoteric   branch   of   science,   or   perhaps  more   accurately  pseudo-­‐science,   that  constitutes  his  most  notable   legacy.  Heuvelmans   is  widely  recognised  as  ‘the  father  of  cryptozoology’,  an  enterprise  he  explains  as  the  ‘study  of  animal  forms  the  existence  of  which  is  based  ...  on  material  proof  judged  insufficient  by  some’.  Throughout  a  prolific  writing  career,  Heuvelmans  battled  tirelessly,  but  with  little  success,  to  establish  the  credibility   of   an   endeavour  widely   viewed  with   scorn   as   the   territory   of   cranks,   hobbyists  and  fraudsters.  Cryptozoology’s  marginality  is  not  so  much  the  result  of  its  central  claim  that  there   are  many   species   existing   unrecognised   by   science,   but  more   to   do  with   what   are,  undoubtedly,   methodological   problems.   Cryptids,   as   these   lost   creatures   are   known   by  aficionados,   are   beasts   of   rumour,   hearsay   and   legend.   Heuvelmans’   work   bestrides   the  zoological   and   the   folkloric,   forcing   the   two   cultures   into   an   uncomfortable   intimacy   in  which  narrative  is  reimagined  as  evidence.  This   paper   focusses   on   Heuvelmans’   1965   monograph   In   the   Wake   of   Sea   Serpents   to  explore   how   cryptozoology   reconceives   processes   of   knowledge   formation.   I   argue   that  cryptozoology’s  hybridity  (part  rational  scientific  endeavour,  part  flight  of  fancy)  surrounds  it  with  a  notable  irony.  For  all  the  commitment  of  enthusiasts  like  Heuvelmans,  cryptozoology  retains  a  specific  investment  in  its  own  failure.  As  soon  as  a  cryptid  is  found,  it  stops  being  a  cryptid;  the  fascination  of  its  secrecy  is  ruined  by  discovery.  If  the  aim  of  cryptozoology  is  to  bring   secret   creatures   to   light,   there   remains   paradoxically   an   aesthetic   frisson   in   their  concealment  that  emerges  as  an  unavoidably  literary  concern.      Knowledge  of  the  Gaze:  Focalisation  through  the  Lens  of  Zoonarratology  Roman  Bartosch  (University  of  Cologne)    The  gaze  is  a  crucial  ethical  concern  in  contemporary  scholarship,  especially  when  it  comes  to   human-­‐animal   encounters.   Studies   of   the   human  or   animal   gaze,   drawing   on   Lacanian,  gender,  or  postcolonial  work  but  mostly  on  Levinasian  ethics,  often  ascertains  that  the  visual  encounter  with  an  ‘other’  constitutes  the  Other  and,  thus,  the  Self  in  genuinely  ethical  and  singular   terms.   Sight   moreover   is   the   primary   means   through   which   knowledge   and  environmental   orientation   is   acquired.   The   notion   of   the   significance   of   visual   perception  and  contact  has   its  own  history   in  Western  thought,  however,  which   links   it   to   logocentric  anthropocentrism  and  a  certain  hostility  to  the  phenomenological  acceptance  of  the  ‘empire  of  the  senses’  (Hovens)  more  generally.    

My  paper  will  set  out  to  discuss  this  problem  from  a  (zoo)narratological  perspective  as  developed  by  David  Herman  and  by  discussing  several  instances  of  human-­‐animal  gazes  engendered  and  narrated  through  focalisation  techniques.  The  immanently  human  perspective  of  literary  texts  and  the  likewise  immanent  event  of  creating  luminal  forms  of  knowledge  through  the  experience  of  alterity,  which  literature  is  capable  of  producing,  will  be  brought  together  in  interpretations  of  Anglophone  and  German  literary  examples.    In  so  doing,  I  will  link  narratological  description  and  the  implications  of  the  narrative  deep  and  surface  structure  for  forms  of  reception  and  interpretation.    At  the  Ends  of  Man:  The  Human  Animal  and  the  Zooanthropology  of  American  Frontiers  Dominik  Ohrem  (University  of  Cologne)    ‘Passing  across  borders  or  the  ends  of  man,’  as  Jacques  Derrida  puts  it,  ‘I  come  or  surrender  to   the   animal   –   to   the   animal   in   itself,   to   the   animal   in  me,   to   the   animal   at   unease  with  itself.’   Derrida’s   notion   of   the   “ends   of   man”   is   ambiguous:   it   may   refer   to   the   ultimate  purpose  or  telos  of  mankind,  point  towards  some  conception  of  a  posthuman  temporality  or  ontology,  but  it  also  evokes  a  decidedly  spatial   imagery  particularly  in  its  combination  with  the   concept   of   the   border.   I   will   take   Derrida’s   philosophical   ruminations   as   a   point   of  departure   for   a   historical   discussion   of   the   ‘metaphysics’   of   the   border   in   relation   to   the  questions   of   human   identity,   human   nature   and   the   anxious   dynamic   of   recognition-­‐disavowal   of   the  human  as   animal.  My   paper’s   focus  will   be   on   the   specifically   American  manifestation   of   the   phenomenon   of   the   border   embodied   by   the   (interwoven)  material,  discursive  and  imaginary  spaces  of  the  Western  frontier,  which  marked  the  progress  of  the  nation’s   territorial   expansion   and,   throughout   the   nineteenth-­‐century,   became   firmly  entrenched   in   the   American   cultural   imaginary.   The   heroics   of   Manifest   Destiny  notwithstanding,   the   frontier   also   produced   an   undercurrent   of   anxiety   that   haunted   the  grandiose   fantasies   of   continental   dominance   emerging   in   the   early   1800s.   Even   though  many  celebrated  expansion  as  a  vital  aspect  of   the  United  States’   rise  to  greatness,  others  showed  concerns  about   the  effects  of   the   frontier  experience  on  both   individuals   and   the  character  of  the  nation  as  a  whole  –  concerns  that  were  often  centered  on  the  problem  of  the  human-­‐animal  boundary.  Did  the  ‘savage’  geographies  of  westward  expansion  reinforce  or   subvert   the   discursive   bifurcation   of   human-­‐animal   difference?   Did   they   encourage  modes  of  life  beyond  the  normative  framework  of  ‘civilized’  humanity?  Such  concerns  were  personified   by   the   figure   of   the   frontiersman,   an   ambiguous   hero   whose   loyalty   to  civilization  and  even  his  humanity   remained  questionable.  My  paper  will  particularly   focus  on  what  may  be  characterized  as  a  contemporary  ‘zooanthropology’  of  the  frontier,  a  variety  of  folk  knowledges  that  circulated  less  in  scientific  circles  than  in  the  broader  cultural  sphere  in   the   writings   of   historians,   literati,   businessmen   and   others.   Taken   together,   these  zooanthropological  attempts  at  coming  to  terms  with  the  liminal  geographies  and  ontologies  of  the  frontier  serve  to  underline  the  fragility  of  American  ‘man’  as  an  animal  profoundly  at  unease  with  itself.    A4  Presenter  Biographies    John  Miller  is  lecturer  in  nineteenth-­‐century  literature  at  the  University  of  Sheffield  and  general  secretary  of  ASLE-­‐UKI.  He  is  the  author  of  Empire  and  the  Animal  Body  (Anthem  2012)  and  Walrus  (with  Louise  Miller,  Reaktion,  2014).  He  is  currently  working  on  two  projects:  Fur:  A  Literary  History  of  Agony  and  Desire  and  Zooheterotopias:  Habitat,  Memory  and  the  Creatures  of  the  Cold  War.    

Roman  Bartosch  is  senior  lecturer  at  the  University  of  Cologne.  He  has  published  on  postcolonial  and  posthumanist  theory  and  (zoo)narratology.  He  is  the  author  of  EnvironMentality  –  Ecocriticism  and  the  Event  of  Postcolonial  Fiction  (Rodopi  2013)  and  editor,  together  with  Sieglinde  Grimm,  of  Teaching  Environments:  Ecocritical  Encounters  (2014)  and  currently  works  on  a  book  on  the  transcultural  evolution  of  werewolf  narratives.    Dominik  Ohrem  teaches  Anglo-­‐American  history  at  the  University  of  Cologne.  His  research  and  teaching  focuses  on  U.S.-­‐histories  of  gender  and  race,  environmental  history,  animal  studies  and  feminist  theory.  He  is  currently  working  on  his  dissertation  with  the  (working)  title  ‘Creatures  of  the  West:  Masculinity,  Animality  and  Multispecies  Lives  on  Nineteenth-­‐Century  American  Frontiers’.    A5:  Scottish  Landscape  Poetics    Fault  Lines,  Right  to  Roam,  and  the  Shirakawa  Barrier:  Radical  Landscape  Poetics  in  Scotland  David  Borthwick  (University  of  Glasgow)    Between  2010  and  2011,  Ken  Cockburn  and  Alec  Finlay  undertook  a  journey  through  Scotland  guided  by  Bashō’s  The  Narrow  Road  to  the  Deep  North.  Cockburn  and  Finlay  transplant  fifteenth  century  Japan  onto  twenty-­‐first  century  Scotland  via  a  ‘mirror-­‐map’,  Edo  becoming  Edinburgh,  Shitomae  the  mountain  Ben  Dorain.3    Their  journey  begins  proper  as  they  pass  through  the  Shirakawa  Barrier,  which  for  Bashō  marked  a  ‘checking  station’,  an  administrative  controlpoint  before  his  journey  to  the  true  north  began.  Gerry  Loose’s  recent  Fault  Line  (2014)  is  a  book-­‐length  documentation  of  the  area  close  to  the  Faslane  Nuclear  Deterrent  facility  in  West  Scotland.  The  poem  focuses  on  knowledge  through  vigilance:  ‘oak  /  birch  /  fern  /  hazel’—a  working  knowledge  of  the  bioregion—but  this  also  includes  military  signage:  ‘report  anything  suspicious’.’4  The  Land  Reform  Scotland  Act  (2003)  gave  all  citizens  the  ‘Right  to  Roam’  responsibly,  enshrining  in  law  unhindered  access  to  open  countryside.  Yet  Finlay  and  Cockburn  question  different  kinds  of  access  as  they  patrol  the  Far  North,  and  Loose  finds  himself  corralled  in  the  West.  In  Edward  Casey’s  terms,  the  land  is  still  divided  by  borders  and  boundaries:  some  physical  and  some  merely  implied.35    Knowing  and  unknowing  landscape  will  form  the  main  theme  of  this  paper,  in  which  I  will  argue  that  varying  kinds  of  knowledge  are  contested  and  politicised  even  in  the  most  remote  Scottish  landscapes,  and  I  will  discuss  ways  in  which  experimental  poetics  delights  in  its  own  brand  of  trespassing,  using  new  law  to  reveal  old  habits.    Re-­‐establishing  the  Oikos:  The  Ecopoetry  of  Hugh  MacDiarmid  Caroline  Rae  (University  of  Amsterdam)    That  the  Scottish  landscape  features  prominently  in  Hugh  MacDiarmid’s  work  has  only  recently  garnered  attention  from  an  ecocritical  perspective.  Louisa  Gairn,  in  particular,  has  suggested  strong  links  between  ecology  and  MacDiarmid,  asserting  his  work  was  heavily  influenced  by  his  relationship  with  Scottish  ecologist  Patrick  Geddes  and  claims  his  work  is  a  form  of  ‘ecopoetics’  –  a  mode  of  writing  that  does  not  seek  a  transcendence  of  nature  but  a  re-­‐evaluation  of  the  relationship  between  the  human  and  non-­‐human  worlds  that  does  not  

3 Alec Finlay and Ken Coburn, the road north (Bristol: Shearsman, 2014), p. 31. 4  Gerry Loose, Fault Line (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2014), p. 24  5  Edward S. Casey, ‘Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History’, Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 507 – 512 (p. 508)  

privilege  one  over  the  other.6  Developing  this  notion  of  ecopoetics  further,  this  paper  will  argue  that  MacDiarmid  utilises  poetry  as  a  means  of  reconnecting  with  the  oikos.  As  the  Greek  prefix  for  ‘eco’,  oikos  is  defined  as  that  which  is  ‘home’,  ‘domestic’  or  ‘dwelling  place’.  Lyotard  interrogates  the  term  further,  describing  it  as  an  implicit,  original  connection  to  humanity’s  habitat  and  claiming  ‘ecology’  is  consequently  all  that  has  not  ‘become  public,  that  has  not  become  communicational,  that  has  not  become  systematic  and  that  can  never  become  any  of  these  things’.7    Believing  discourse  to  have  disrupted  and  suppressed  humanity’s  fundamental  connection  to  the  oikos,  Lyotard  claims  it  is  through  literature  and  writing  that  this  can  be  re-­‐established.  Focusing  particularly  on  On  a  Raised  Beach  and  with  reference  to  The  Eemis  Stane  and  My  Songs  are  Kandym  in  the  Wasteland,  this  paper  therefore  seeks  to  firmly  position  MacDiarmid  within  the  field  of  ecocriticism,  suggesting  his  techniques  and  style  allow  for  a  critical  re-­‐examination  of  humanity’s  relationship  to  the  natural  world.      “Everything  else  is  provisional”:  Dwelling  in  Kathleen  Jamie’s  Writing  Monika  Szuba  (University  of  Gdansk)    On  the  crossroads  between  landscape,  language  and  history,  Kathleen  Jamie’s  work  is  concerned  with  interrelations  between  land  and  writing.  Following  deep  green  poetics,  it  recognises  intrinsic  value  in  nature  and  renegotiates  our  place  in  the  world.  The  major  concerns  in  Jamie’s  early  poetry  collections  –  national  and  gender  identity  –  have  yielded  to  the  examination  of  the  natural  world  in  her  latest  poetry  volumes  The  Tree  House  (2004)  and  The  Overhaul  (2012),  as  well  as  the  essay  collections  Findings  (2005)  and  Sightlines  (2012).  Offering  quiet  resistance  in  the  face  of  environmental  degradation,  Jamie  points  to  the  neccessity  to  find  one’s  dwelling  place,  exploring  old  and  new  ways  of  moving  through  a  landscape.  Her  pared  down,  minimalistic  style  emerges  from  watchful  listening.  Limpid  language  is  accompanied  by  its  musicality:  elliptical  sentences  and  economical  use  of  poetic  devices  are  the  main  characteristics  of  Jamie’s  style.  This  paper  aims  to  examine  Jamie's  engagement  with  the  natural  world  across  the  nature  and  culture  divide.  It  attempts  to  study  poetic  explorations  of  home  in  the  context  of  the  concept  of  dwelling,  and  it  seeks  to  provide  an  analysis  of  its  ontological  and  temporal  aspects.  Further,  it  will  discuss  how  these  negotiations  are  related  to  diverse  ways  of  knowing  the  world,  demonstrating  longing  for  unity  and  wholeness  present  in  Jamie’s  poetry  and  essays.  Finally,  it  aims  to  analyse  selected  texts  considering  both  their  thematic  aspects  and  technical  aspects.      A5  Presenter  Biographies    David  Borthwick      Caroline  Rae  is  a  recent  English  Literature  Master's  graduate  from  the  University  of  Amsterdam  where  she  wrote  her  thesis  on  Contemporary  Scottish  Gothic.  Prior  to  that,  Caroline  completed  her  Bachelor's  in  English  Literature  and  German  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh.    Monika  Szuba  completed  her  PhD  on  the  subject  of  strategies  of  contestation  in  the  novels  of  contemporary  Scottish  women  authors.  She  has  published  a  number  of  articles  on  

6 Gairn, Louisa. ‘MaDiarmid and Ecology’. The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 82-96. 7 Lyotard, Jean Francois. ‘Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded’. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed Laurence Coupe. Oxon: Routledge, 2000. 135 -138.    

contemporary  fiction  and  poetry.  She  is  co-­‐organizer  of  International  Literary  Festival  BETWEEN  in  Sopot,  Poland.  She  is  also  co-­‐editor  of  the  between.pomiędzy  series  published  by  the  University  of  Gdańsk  Press  and  one  of  the  founding  members  of  the  Textual  Studies  Research  Group  as  well  as  the  Scottish  Studies  Research  Group  at  the  University  of  Gdańsk.  Her  research  interests  include  contemporary  British  poetry  and  prose.    A6:  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  1:  Energy  stories,  energy  histories    Narrating  Catastrophe:  Oral  and  Fictional  Histories  of  the  Torrey  Canyon  Oil  Spill  Timothy  Cooper  (University  of  Exeter)    The  Torrey  Canyon  oil  disaster  in  Cornwall  1967  remains  a  key  turning  point  in  the  politics  of  the  contemporary  global  energy  regime.  The  wreck  of  the  ‘jumboised’  oil  tanker  registered  in  ecological  terms  the  effects  of  the  transformation  of  the  global  political  economy  of  energy  distribution  and  technological  transformation  in  the  wake  of  the  Suez  crisis.  Its  effects  were  profound  both  in  terms  of  environmental  politics  and  cultural  appropriations  of  the  imagery  of  the  disaster.  In  this  paper  I  draw  upon  two  ways  of  narrating  the  disaster.  Firstly,  by  drawing  on  a  series  of  oral  history  interviews  conducted  with  people  present  at,  or  participant  in,  the  subsequent  clean-­‐up  operation.  Secondly  by  drawing  upon  autobiographical  and  fictional  narratives  inspired  by  the  disaster  and  subsequent  similar  spills,  most  particularly  Hammond  Innes’  The  Black  Tide,  an  account  of  the  repetition  of  the  Torrey  Canyon  incident  in  the  form  of  the  fictional  subsequent  wreck  of  another  tanker,  the  Petros  Jupiter  off  Lands’  End.  Through  comparison  of  the  different  narratives  offered  in  the  oral  and  fictional  histories  of  the  post  Torrey  Canyon  world,  I  reflect  on  the  nature  of  the  differences  between  formal  and  popular  environmentalism,  the  meaning  of  environmental  disasters,  and  complex  distinctions  in  accounts  of  relationships  between  capital,  energy  and  everyday  life.    Stories  and  the  Sea:  George  Mackay  Brown,  Bakhtin,  and  the  future  of  Marine  Renewables  in  Orkney  and  beyond  Rebecca  Ford  (Orkney)    The  town  of  Stromness  in  Orkney  was  home  to  poet  George  Mackay  Brown,  and  in  recent  years  has  become  the  location  of  development  in    Marine  Renewable  Energy  (MRE).    Brown’s  work,  celebrating  the  rhythms  and  cycles  of  life  and  humanity’s  struggle  for  survival,  often  rails  against  progress  and  the  advance  of  technology,  while  arguing  for  the  importance  of  the  role  of  the  poet  in  a  community,  and  the  power  of  word  and  story  to  articulate  the  relationship  between  humans  and  their  environment.  This  paper,  moves  from  Brown’s  writing  about  Stromness  and  the  sea,  to  consider  contemporary  narratives,  both  within  and  out  with  Orkney,  about  the  role  of  MRE  as  part  of  humanity’s  response  to  the  challenge  of  meeting  future  energy  demands  while  addressing  the  dangers  of  climate  change.  In  looking  at  narratives  and  storytelling  about  MRE  from  a  dialogical  perspective,  it  will  consider  how  the  process  of  storytelling,  and  the  contexts  and  relationships  this  involves,    influence  meaning  making  and  understanding  at  every  level,  from  the  local  to  the  global.  Drawing  on  the  work  of  Mikhail  Bakhtin  it  will  argue  that  the  importance  of  storytelling,  identified  by  Brown,  lies  in  its  ability  to  engage  and  affect  individuals  on  a  personal  level,  with  the  power  of  any  narrative  lying  in  the  interaction  between  individually  persuasive,  and  socially  authoritative  discourse.  Just  as  Stromness  and  Orkney  are  evoked  and  interpreted  for  many  through  the  words  of  George  Mackay  Brown,  the  future  of  MRE  depends  on  which  stories  get  told  and  who  gets  to  tell  them.      

Narratives  of  history  and  energy  Nicola  Whyte  (University  of  Exeter)    The  purpose  of  this  paper  is  to  outline  an  alternative  history  of  energy,  one  that  is  deeply  embedded  in  the  history  of  everyday  life  and  the  production  and  reproduction  of  community  relations  in  the  pre-­‐industrial  past.  In  recent  years  important  work  has  been  carried  out  by  economic  and  environmental  historians  in  quantifying  energy  consumption  since  the  sixteenth  century.  This  has  added  to  our  understanding  of  carbon  consumption  over  a  much  longer  timeframe,  while  also  revealing  the  diverse  energy  ‘mix’  that  people  relied  upon  in  the  past.  In  particular,  analyses  of  pre-­‐industrial  energy  regimes  have  situated  human  labour  and  animal  power  at  the  forefront  of  discussion.  For  heating,  cooking  and  early  industrial  processes  a  diverse  range  of  energy  sources  was  also  tapped,  including  wood,  peat,  charcoal,  coal,  water,  and  wind.  It  is  the  history  of  renewable  sources  of  energy  -­‐  wind  and  water  power  -­‐  that  is  of  particular  concern  here.  It  will  be  argued  that  History  offers  a  vital  context  for  rethinking  and  reimagining  what  a  low  carbon  landscape  might  look  like  now  and  in  the  future.  It  is  not  only  the  material  evidence  that  concerns  us,  for  an  understanding  of  the  socio-­‐political  production  and  reproduction  of  everyday  life  in  the  past  has  a  great  deal  to  offer  in  understanding  and  reinvigorating  the  politics  of  energy  from  below.  In  the  early  modern  period  the  production  of  energy  was  an  integral  component  of  social  systems  of  exchange  and  was  deeply  embedded  in  forging  communities  of  practice.      Presenter  Biographies    Timothy  Cooper      Rebecca  Ford      Nicola  Whyte          

Panel  Session  B:  Wednesday  2nd  September  3.00pm-­‐4.30pm    B1:  Towards  an  ecological  understanding  of  collaborative  practices  with  and  between  art  and  poetry,  place  and  landscape  II    Glossing  /  Trespassing  /  Annotating:  Forest  Expectation  Sites  Amy  Cutler  (University  of  Leeds)    

the  edge  of  forest  exacts  a  fine  trespass  –  Peter  Larkin    

This  paper  considers  literally  marginal  methodologies  for  knowledge:  the  REF-­‐side-­‐lined  practices  of  glossing,  annotating,  and  parsing.  The  exhibition  Forest  Exhibition  Sites  (2015)  presented  the  works  of  the  essayist  and  poet  Peter  Larkin  via  thirty  artists’  and  scholars’  interventions  with  fragments  of  his  text.  I  will  use  these  speculative  intertexts  –  Larkin’s  work  scribbled  over  and  re-­‐vocalised  by  contributors  including  Richard  Skelton,  Robert  Macfarlane,  Jonathan  Skinner,  and  Emma  Mason  –  to  consider  the  place  of  new  material  cultures  of  scholarship  within  green  knowledge.  Drawing  on  canonical  discussions  of  both  written  marginalia  and  its  facsimiles  (Jackson,  2001)  and  of  printed  para-­‐textual  traditions,  from  Valéry’s  ‘Quelques  fragments  de  Marginalia’  (1927)  to  Derrida’s  ‘Tympan’  (1972),  I  will  

discuss  the  ecological  worth  of  these  modern  “specimen”  commentaries,  including  revived  forms  in  The  Glossator  as  well  as  the  new  journals  Para·∙text  and  Prac  Crit.  In  the  second  half  of  the  paper  I  will  focus  on  the  exhibition’s  materials,  showing  how  these  notations  of  the  paper  archive  respond  to  the  ecology  of  disturbed  forest  sites.  Larkin’s  own  writings  explore  violable  woodlands  as  vandalized  texts,  process  points,  and  ‘resource  opportunities  out  of  which  cultures  can  be  remade’.8His  treatments  of  land  stratification  and  the  different  tiers  of  managed  and  natural  space  recognise  woodland  as  open,  cut-­‐into,  and  worked  over.  These  concerns  for  edge-­‐lands,  access  points  and  ‘disturbance  regime(s)’9  are  materialized  in  the  invasive  practices  of  his  readers.  “Taking  a  leaf”  from  the  American  poet  Susan  Howe’s  punning  on  forests  and  bibliographic  archives,  the  gloss-­‐excursions  in  Forest  Expectation  Sites  combine  as  a  group  study  of  the  page  as  index  to  the  natural  world.  From  Macfarlane’s  pigmented  textual  cuttings  to  Sarah  Howe’s  transplanting  of  broken-­‐off  cultures  of  the  willow  in  Chinoiserie,  the  collection  also  traces  the  textual  genetics  of  the  forest  as  a  space  that  allows  for  deletion,  insertion,  and  revision.  This  paper  explores  both  scholarly  means  to  knowledge  and  the  copious  human  annotation  of  these  transition  spaces,  just  ‘as  forest  became  copious  wood  culture’,10  transposed  from  the  vandalized  margins  of  “civilization”.      Halse  for  hazel  by  Frances  Presley  with  images  by  Irma  Irsara  Frances  Presley    Halse  for  hazel  is  a  book  of  trees.    It  explores  the  languages  and  visual  patterns  we  use  for  them,  especially  those  used  by  or  for  women.    It  was  written  in  dialogue  with  the  images  of  Irma  Irsara.    ‘Halse’  is  Exmoor  dialect  for  hazel,  as  noted  by  local  historian  Hazel  Eardley-­‐Wilmot:  a  convergence  of  names  which  initiates  a  new  poetic  syntax  of  marginal  trees  and  tongues.    Tree  languages,  which  include  local  dialect,  as  well  as  ancient  and  runic  scripts,  are  analysed  and  reassembled.    Halse  also  draws  on  the  languages  of  forestry,  botany  and  the  naming  of  trees,  with  their  male  bias.      Direct  experience  of  trees  in  the  landscape  is  equally  significant  in  Halse  and  in  Presley  and  Irsara’s  collaboration.    It  includes  poems  and  images  created  on  site,  at  or  even  inside  trees.    The  reinvention  of  poetic  language  and  visual  form  is  often  shaped  by  the  inventiveness  of  wild  trees,  which  evolve  in  all  kinds  of  surprising  ways,  such  as  ancient  birch  migrating  horizontally  along  the  ground,  sending  up  new  shoots.    Halse  for  hazel  has  three  sections,  Halse,  Col  and  Hassel:  alternate  and  playful  names  for  hazel,  which  map  wide  ranging  geographic  and  linguistic  areas,  as  well  as  political  and  environmental  pressures.    The  paper  will  focus  on  some  key  images  and  texts  from  the  book  which  include  migrating  birch;  the  burning  of  wood;  and  rare  whitebeam  species.          Deerhart:  Deconstructing  the  Nature  /  Culture  Boundary  via  Experimental  Art  and  Poetry  Yvonne  Reddick    Deerhart  is  a  collaborative  ecopoetry  and  visual  art  installation.  An  accompanying  poetry  and  art  pamphlet  has  been  commissioned  by  the  experimental  poetry  publisher  Knives,  Forks  and  Spoons  press.    The  project  is  the  result  of  the  first  phase  of  a  partnership  between  the  British  painter,  printmaker  and  sculptor  Diana  Zwibach,  and  the  British-­‐Swiss  poet  and  ecopoetics  scholar  Yvonne  Reddick.  Deerhart  moves  forwards  from  deep  time,  unearthing  

8 Peter Larkin, ‘Innovation Contra Acceleration’, boundary 2 vol. 26 no. 1 (1999), p. 173. 9 Peter Larkin, Leaves of Field (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2006), p. 77. 10 Peter Larkin, ibid., p. 73.  

knowledge  about  extinct  creatures,  towards  contemporary  encounters  between  humans  and  nonhuman  animals.  Deerhart  challenges  Jonathan  Skinner’s  assertion  that  “The  true  north  of  ecopoetics  is  sound,”11  by  creating  hybrid  poetry/visual  art  installations  whose  visual  aspects  are  as  important  as  their  sound.  The  poems  and  artworks  expand  upon  Gander  and  Kinsella’s  theory  that  the  ‘syntax,  line  break,  or  the  shape  of  the  poem  on  the  page  express  an  ecological  ethics,’  and  engage  with  their  idea  that  ‘our  perceptual  experience  is  mostly  palimpsestic’.12  Zwibach’s  layered  charcoal  artworks  resonate  with  Gander  and  Kinsella’s  theories,  while  the  interruption  of  Zwibach’s  images  into  the  text  of  Reddick’s  open-­‐form  poems  creates  a  more  radical  visual  dimension  than  Gander  and  Kinsella  envisage.    Reddick  and  Zwibach  focus  especially  on  women’s  experiences  and  women’s  encounters  with  female  creatures.  Deerhart  draws  on  research  by  feminist  critics,  such  as  Haraway’s  seminal  work  on  cyborgs  as  ‘hybrid  entities  made  of,  first,  ourselves  and  other  organic  creatures’;13  the  poems  imagine  what  such  hybrids  would  say  if  they  had  a  voice.  In  contemporary  poetry,  ‘the  inner  self/outer  world  distinction  so  dear  to  nature  poetry  through  the  ages  has  become  outdated’.14  Deerhart  aims  to  deconstruct  the  perceived  boundary  between  ‘nature’  and  ‘culture’,  to  privilege  women’s  experiences,  and  to  push  the  boundaries  of  poetic  and  artistic  practice.    B1  Presenter  Biographies    Amy  Cutler  is  a  curator,  researcher,  and  currently  Post-­‐Doctoral  Research  Fellow  in  Environmental  Humanities  at  the  University  of  Leeds.  She  received  her  doctorate  in  Cultural  Geography  from  Royal  Holloway,  University  of  London,  after  completing  degrees  in  English  Literature  at  Oxford.  She  writes  on  late  twentieth  century  poetry  and  British  geography;  she  also  founded  the  cultural  geography  themed  cinema  PASSENGERFILMS,  and  has  twice  in  a  row  received  the  national  award  from  the  British  Federation  of  Film  Societies  for  her  work  curating  film  for  research.  In  June  2013  she  curated  the  exhibition  Time,  the  deer,  is  in  the  wood  of  Hallaig,  on  forests,  history,  and  social  /  environmental  memory,  in  collaboration  with  the  Kew  Museum  of  Economic  Botany  and  the  UCL  Dendrochronology  Laboratory.  She  was  recently  selected  for  AHRC  Science  in  Culture’s  2014  shortlist  of  fifteen  early  career  researchers  in  the  UK  doing  inspiring  work  in  arts-­‐science  collaboration,  and  is  currently  the  lead  academic  on  a  new  White  Rose  network  across  Leeds,  Sheffield,  and  York,  Hearts  of  Oak:  Caring  for  British  Forests,  which  will  include  site-­‐specific  events  related  to  forest  research  in  the  humanities  across  2015.  As  well  as  the  forthcoming  Peter  Riley:  Critical  Essays  (Gylphi,  2015),  she  is  currently  editing  an  experimental  collaborative  book  of  philosophical  essays,  Were  X  A  Tree,  for  Punctum  Books,  due  2015.    Frances  Presley  grew  up  in  Lincolnshire  and  Somerset,  and  lives  in  London.    She  studied  literature  at  East  Anglia  and  Sussex  universities.    She  was  a  librarian  in  community  development  and  at  the  Poetry  Library.    Publications  include  The  Sex  of  Art,  1987;  Hula  Hoop,  1993;  Linocut,  1997;  Neither  the  One  nor  the  Other,  an  email  text  and  performance  with  Elizabeth  James,  1999;  Automatic  Cross  Stitch  with  artist  Irma  Irsara,  2000;  Somerset  

11 Jonathan Skinner, ecopoetry workshop at the University of Warwick, April 2013. 12 Forrest Gander and John Kinsella, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2012), p. 2. 13 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge 1991), 1. 14 Harriet Tarlo, ‘Women and ecopoetics: an introduction in context.’ How 2 3.2 (Summer 2008) 1-24 (p. 15).  

letters,  2002;  Paravane:  new  and  selected  poems,  1996-­‐2003;  Myne:  new  and  selected  poems  and  prose,  1976-­‐2005;  Lines  of  Sight,  2009;  Stone  settings,  a  collaboration  with  Tilla  Brading,  2010;  An  Alphabet  for  Alina  with  drawings  by  Peterjon  Skelt,  2012;  and  Halse  for  hazel,  2014.    Her  work  is  in  various  anthologies  including  Infinite  Difference,  2010,  and  Ground  Aslant:  radical  landscape  poetry,  2011.    She  has  translated  Norwegian  poets  Hanne  Bramness  and  Lars  Amund  Vaage.    She  has  written  essays  and  reviews,  especially  on  British  women  poets,  and  also  for  Cusp:  recollections  of  poetry  in  transition,  2012.        Yvonne  Reddick  is  a  poet,  environmental  writer  and  researcher.  She  holds  a  Research  Fellowship  in  Modern  English  and  World  Literatures  at  the  University  of  Central  Lancashire,  concurrently  with  Visiting  Fellowships  at  the  University  of  Liverpool  and  Wolfson  College,  Cambridge.  She  read  English  at  Cambridge  and  received  her  PhD  on  Ted  Hughes’s  ecopoetry  from  the  University  of  Warwick.  Her  first  monograph,  The  ‘Greening’  of  Ted  Hughes:  Environment,  Animals  and  Ecopoetry,  is  under  review  by  Oxford  University  Press,  and  her  academic  articles  have  been  published  in  English,  Cambridge  Quarterly,  Interdisciplinary  Studies  in  Literature  and  the  Environment  and  Modern  Language  Review.  Her  published  poetic  work  includes  open-­‐form  visual  poetry,  palimpsestic  screen  prints,  and  translations  from  Congolese,  Chilean  and  Medieval  French  poets.  Her  next  pamphlet,  Deerhart,  a  collaboration  with  the  artist  Diana  Zwibach,  has  been  commissioned  by  the  experimental  poetry  publisher  Knives,  Forks  and  Spoons  Press.  She  is  beginning  a  new  ecocritical  research  project  on  the  Congo  and  Niger  in  English  and  French-­‐language  literature  of  the  twentieth  and  twenty-­‐first  centuries.    B2:  Limits  and  New  Directions    Knowing  Genre,  Knowing  Nature?  A  Narratologically-­‐Inflected  Approach  To  Ecocriticism  And  Genre  Astrid  Bracke  (University  of  Amsterdam)    The  proposed  paper  foregrounds  the  importance  of  literary  genre  in  the  ways  we  imagine,  narrate  and  understand  the  world.  It  seeks  to  position  genre  as  a  key  category  within  ecocriticism.  Consequently,  it  will  provide  a  framework  for  a  narratologically-­‐inflected  ecocriticism  (drawing  on  Herman,  Lehtimäki  and  others),  which  differs  from  the  reader-­‐response  approach  to  genre  dominant  in  ecocriticism  that  evaluates  genres  as  suitable  or  unsuitable  to  ecocritical  aims  (Kerridge;  Kluwick).    The  paper  argues  that  a  textual,  literary  landscape  is  never  just  a  representation,  but  always  determined  by  the  narratological  elements  that  shape  it  –  just  as  extratextual  landscapes  are  the  product  of  their  historical,  political,  cultural  and  environmental  circumstances.  Asking  questions  about  a  text's  narratological  aspects  leads  to  a  fuller  and  more  extensive  ecocritical  analysis  that  emphasizes  the  effects  that  different  ways  of  telling  –  or  framing  –  stories  have  on  our  narratives  of  nonhuman  natural  environments.    After  a  brief  theoretical  discussion  of  the  parameters  of  my  approach,  I’ll  apply  it  to  two  genres  that  explicitly  reconceptualize  nature  in  the  Anthropocene  –  clifi  and  new  British  nature  writing.  I'll  demonstrate  that  it  is  not  so  much  the  kinds  of  natural  landscapes  or  environmental  crises  depicted  that  determine  how  we  interpret  nature  in  these  works,  but  rather  their  genre.  In  this  respect  I'll  also  engage  with  environmental  humanities'  calls  for  new  narratives  of  the  Anthropocene,  and  suggest  that  we  don't  just  need  new  narratives  but  also  more  understanding  of  the  way  in  which  existing  stories  work  on  a  narratological  level,  and  thereby  shape  our  experiences  of  nature.    

Inspire  Lecture:  Animal  Lives,  Binary  Opposition  and  Barbara  Kingsolver's  Prodigal  Summer    Hayden  Gabriel  (University  of  St  Mark  and  St  John)    The  paper  explores  ways  in  which  notions  of  binary  opposition  inform  perceptions  of  human  relationships  with  non-­‐human  species,  charting  the  challenge  Barbara  Kingsolver’s  novel,  Prodigal  Summer,  makes  to  those  dualistic  assumptions,  not  least  through  its  bringing  together  of  literature  and  science  and  in  its  depiction  of  more  sustainable  ways  of  being.            Is  There  A  Thing  It  Is  Like  To  Be  Adonis?    Raphael  Lyne  (University  of  Cambridge)    In  Shakespeare's  Venus  and  Adonis,  I  will  argue,  there  are  moments  where  the  interior  worlds  of  a  horse,  a  hare,  a  boar,  and  a  goddess,  are  vividly  evoked.  The  only  significant  human  presence,  however,  remains  opaque.  In  the  environmentally-­‐aware  Shakespeare  criticism  of  Robert  Watson,  Gabriel  Egan,  and  Simon  Palfrey,  it's  apparent  that  the  problem  of  other  minds  is  an  ecological  problem.  How  we  go  about  deciding  whether  we  can  know  what  it  is  like  to  be  a  bat  (Thomas  Nagel's  classic  question,  turned  over  in  Peter  Hacker's  essay  'Is  There  a  Thing  it  is  Like  to  be  a  Bat?')  has  consequences  for  how  we  conceive  of  an  interconnected,  interdependent  world,  or  don't.  I  will  focus  most  of  all  on  what  a  poem,  and  the  criticism  of  a  poem,  can  contribute  to  our  thinking  about  interfaces  between  heterophenomenology  (Daniel  Dannett's  contested  term)  and  environmentalism.      B2  Presenter  Biographies    Astrid  Bracke      Hayden  Gabriel  Hayden  Gabriel  is  Programme  Leader  for  English  and  Creative  Writing  at  the  University  of  St  Mark  and  St  John,  Plymouth.    A  graduate  of  the  Creative  Writing  MA  at  the  University  of  East  Anglia,  Hayden’s  first  two  novels,  The  Quickening  Ground  and  A  Wonderful  Use  for  Fire  were  published  by  Macmillan  in  the  UK,  and  by  Simon  and  Schuster  in  the  USA.    Both  works  explore  our  relationship  with  landscape  and  with  non-­‐human  creatures.    ‘Which  stories  might  we  be  telling  now  in  the  hope  of  forming  part  of  a  coherent  and  useful  response  to  environmental  crisis?’  is  the  question  at  the  centre  of  Hayden’s  PhD  in  Creative  Writing.    It’s  a  question  her  third  novel,  The  Returning,  seeks  to  answer  –  as,  indeed,  has  all  her  creative  output  and  academic  research.    Raphael  Lyne      B3:  Pre-­‐20th  Century  Natural  Histories    Environment,  Material  Agency,  and  Evolutionary  Decline  in  Late  Victorian  Science  and  Fiction  Clare  Echterling  (University  of  Kansas)    One  of  the  goals  of  the  new  materialisms  is  to  theorize  the  agency  of  matter.  Such  work  seeks  to  break  from  the  Cartesian  view,  which  defines  matter  as  inert  and  uniform,  by  showing  how  matter  is  in  fact  quite  lively  and  agentic.  The  new  materialisms  also  emphasize  the  “trans-­‐corporeality”  of  human  beings  (Alaimo),  arguing  that  we  are  not  only  material  beings,  but  also  always  coming  into  contact  with  other  material  entities,  which  affect  us  in  significant  ways.  

I  identify  a  similar  recognition  in  the  writings  of  Victorian  authors  and  scientists  who  had  realized  in  the  wake  of  the  Darwinian  revolution  that  white  races  were  subject  to  the  same  material  processes  as  nonwhite  peoples  and  animals.  Writers  such  as  Charles  Kingsley,  H.G.  Wells,  and  scientists  like  James  Hunt  all  describe  nonhuman  nature  and  evolutionary  processes  in  ways  that  acknowledge  matter’s  agency.  The  late  Victorian  recognition  of  material  agency  was  considerably  darker  than  recent  theorizations  that  use  matter’s  vitality  as  a  basis  for  environmental  politics.  The  unpredictability  of  material  processes,  and  the  human’s  vulnerability  to  them,  was  a  source  of  anxiety  for  the  Victorians,  who  were  deeply  invested  in  maintaining  their  own  supposed  evolutionary  superiority.  An  important  question  for  19th  century  scientists  such  as  Hunt,  then,  was  whether  or  not  specific  environmental  conditions  caused  degeneration.  For  Hunt  and  many  others,  the  answer  was  yes.  This  presentation  will  briefly  examine  material  agency  in  several  scientific  and  fictional  writings  of  environmentally  wrought  evolutionary  decline  while  considering  the  racial  and  environmental  implications  of  such  representations.    Charles  Darwin’s  Postmortem  Natural  History:  Decomposing  the  Earth  Through  the  Action  of  Worms  Sarah  Bezan  (University  of  Alberta)    In  Darwin’s  Worms,  psychoanalyst  Adam  Phillips  argues  that  Darwin’s  final  book  on  the  earthworm  (1881)  is  “obsessed  by  burial,”  “counter-­‐elegaic,”  and  representative  of  a  kind  of  “secular  after-­‐life:  the  life  of  the  world  that  continues  after  one’s  own  death.”  Imagining  such  a  world  -­‐  the  world  of  being  dead,  of  decomposition  and  reconstitution  beyond  the  scope  of  an  overseer  -­‐  leads  us  to  consider  how  natural  history  presumes  the  reliability  of  the  postmortem  organism  (fossil,  skeleton,  etc)  as  a  stable  source  of  knowledge  and  an  impervious  record  of  the  history  of  species  adaptation,  evolution,  and  extinction.  But  how  does  an  encounter  with  what  Jessica  Mordsley  calls  the  “terrifying,  faceless,  nameless  long-­‐dead  animal  other”  create  productive  possibilities  for  thinking  and  un-­‐thinking  the  constitution  of  the  human  and  non-­‐human  animal  in  natural  science?  How,  indeed,  can  we  pinpoint  the  origin  of  humanity  when  the  nonhuman  animal  remains  entangled  in  the  play  of  traces  that  is  embedded  within  the  DNA  ancestry  of  every  species?  And  how  does  recognizing  the  inter-­‐connection  of  living  and  dead  organisms  -­‐  for  example,  the  action  of  the  worm  on  a  decaying  leaf  -­‐  fortify  an  alternative  view  of  the  earth,  or  “world”?  As  I  argue,  Darwin’s  notion  that  the  earth  is  reconstituted  and  re-­‐created  through  the  digestive  action  of  the  earthworm  leads  to  the  view  that  the  natural  world  exists  in  deep  time,  where  organisms,  whether  living  or  dead,  remain  in  a  continuous  state  of  change.  Thus,  in  advancing  a  postmortem  reading  of  natural  history,  this  paper  examines  how  Darwin’s  later  work  on  earthworms  conceptualizes  an  alternative  view  of  the  world  that  emphasizes  its  capacity  to  recompose,  disassemble  and  recreate  itself  through  continual  death  and  decomposition.    Natural  Histories  of  the  Colonial  Caribbean  Brycchan  Carey  (University  of  Kingston)      B3  Presenter  Biographies    Clare  Echterling      Sarah  Bezan      

Brycchan  Carey      B4:  Contemporary  literatures  and  the  possibilities  and  limits  of  knowing      The  speculative  real  in  contemporary  fiction  and  theory:  Yann  Martel’s  Life  of  Pi  and  the  limits  of  knowing    Louise  Squire  (University  of  Portsmouth)  At  the  frontier  of  contemporary  theory,  a  question  mark  currently  arises  between  the  theoretics  of  phenomenology  and  those  of  the  speculative  real.  Tom  Sparrow  (2014)  refers  to  this  question  mark  as  ‘the  end  of  phenomenology’,  while  Timothy  Clark  remarks:  ‘all  that  is  most  challenging  in  the  twenty-­‐first  century  about  the  environmental  crisis  –  politically,  sociologically,  and  philosophically  –  can  be  gauged  to  the  degree  to  which  it  challenges  or  even  eludes  altogether  a  phenomenological  approach’  (2014:  284).  If  by  phenomenology  we  mean  the  study  of  the  experiential  mode  of  the  subject,  or  the  ‘structures  of  consciousness  as  experienced  from  the  first-­‐person  point  of  view’  (Woodruff-­‐Smith  2003,  updated  2013),  then  its  “end”  might  be  found  in  the  emergence  of  the  speculative  real.  The  broad  aim  of  speculative  realism  might  be  understood  as  the  desire  to  ‘reconnect  philosophy  to  the  ‘great  outside’  of  the  inhuman  and  ultimately  contingent  world’  (Padui  2011:  90-­‐91).  Accordingly,  one  of  its  key  objectives  is  to  overcome  that  difficulty  of  post-­‐Kantian  thought,  defined  by  Meillassoux  as  ‘correlationism’,  whereby:  ‘All  we  ever  engage  with  is  what  is  given-­‐to-­‐thought,  never  an  entity  subsisting  by  itself’  (Meillassoux  2012:  36).  Taking  Yann  Martel’s  Life  of  Pi  as  its  example,  this  paper  will  consider  the  ways  in  which  contemporary  fiction  complicates  the  distinction  between  the  phenomenological  limits  of  human  knowing  and  the  speculative  possibilities  of  thinking  the  unknowable.      Ways  of  knowing  and  Ruth  Ozeki’s  A  Tale  for  the  Time  Being  Emily  Alder  (Edinburgh  Napier  University)    There  are  many  ways  of  knowing  the  ecological  world  in  which  (non)human  existence  transpires,  and  which  is  modified  through  that  transpiration.  One  ontological  and  epistemological  perspective,  dominant  in  Western  thought  since  the  Enlightenment,  has  justified  human  mastery  of  nature.  Such  a  position  is  associated  with  dualisms  separating  (inter  alia)  human/  nonhuman,  body/  mind,  rational  male/  irrational  female,  rational  civilised/  irrational  savage.  This  way  of  knowing  the  world  arguably  leads  ultimately  towards  an  ethics  that  prioritises  the  human  and  justifies  the  instrumental  use  of  the  nonhuman,  and  which  inhibits  more  ecological  modes  of  thought,  living,  or  organisation.    Literature,  through  its  imaginative  content  and  narrative  form,  has  the  capacity  to  interrogate  existing  ways  of  knowing  and  to  suggest  alternatives.  This  paper  examines  how  Ruth  Ozeki’s  2012  novel  A  Tale  for  the  Time  Being  works  to  tackle  some  of  these  dominant  dualistic  principles  of  cultural  organisation.  Through  its  framed  and  nested  narrations,  the  textual  instability  of  time  and  place,  and  the  notion  of  what  Ozeki  has  referred  to  as  ‘interbeing’,  the  narrative  tests  distinctions  and  polarisations  that  constrain  capacity  to  construct  more  ecologically  and  culturally  equal  and  aware  ways  of  being.  Conventional  boundaries  of  self,  nation,  place,  and  time  are  questioned.  The  capacity  for  pre-­‐existing  identity  structures  to  break  down  becomes,  conversely,  a  productive  process,  as  the  novel  imagines  different  ways  of  understanding  relationships  between  different  cultures,  and  the  place  of  the  individual,  in  a  globalised  world.    The  Green  Woman:  Ecofeminist  Realities  in  John  Fowles’  The  French  Lieutenant’s  Woman  Aisha  Nazeer  (University  of  St  Andrews)  

 In  his  1979  book  The  Tree  John  Fowles  vehemently  argues  that  the  violent  anthropocentricism  of  the  dominant  scientific  perspective  is  responsible  for  our  denigrated  relationship  with  nature.  Originating  in  Victorian  conceptualisations  of  knowledge,  Fowles  critiques  the  ‘endless  classifying  and  anatomising  of  Victorian  biology  –pigeonholing  and  cutting  the  (dead)  subjects  to  pieces’.  In  a  rousing  diatribe,  Fowles  calls  upon  his  reader  to  abandon  this  purely  scientific  lens,  since  ‘it  is  only  because  such  a  vast  sum  of  interactions  and  coincidences  in  time  and  place  is  beyond  science’s  calculation  […]  that  we  habitually  ignore  it,  and  treat  the  flight  of  the  bird  and  the  branch  it  flies  from,  the  leaf  in  the  wind  and  its  shadow  on  the  ground  as  separate  events’.  Through  further  reading  of  The  Tree  alongside  examination  of  Fowles’  1969  novel  The  French  Lieutenant’s  Woman,  this  presentation  will  assess  Fowles’  exploration  of  science  as  a  patriarchal  viewpoint  which  oppresses  both  women  and  nature.  An  ecofeminist  reading  will  allow  me  to  argue  that  Fowles’  most  highly  regarded  novel  censures  the  classificatory  gaze  of  science  characterised  in  Charles  Smithson,  the  amateur  scientist,  in  favour  of  the  more  feminine  “total  reality”  of  Sarah  Woodruff.  Despite  ecofeminism  launching  after  the  publication  of  The  Tree  and  The  French  Lieutenant’s  Woman,  it  will  become  clear  that  Fowles  anticipated  the  critique  of  the  patriarchal  mutual  oppression  of  women  and  nature,  whilst  acknowledging  the  need  to  actualise  an  ecofeminist  reality  through  celebrating  the  relationship  between  women  and  the  environment.    B4  Presenter  Biographies    Louise  Squire  recently  completed  her  doctoral  studies  at  the  University  of  Surrey.  She  is  currently  based  at  the  University  of  Portsmouth  and  is  working  on  a  monograph  based  on  her  doctoral  dissertation.  She  has  published  several  articles,  including  in  the  prestigious  Oxford  Literary  Review,  and  is  co-­‐editor  of  a  book  on  Literature  and  Sustainability,  forthcoming  with  Manchester  University  Press  (2016).  Louise  is  Web  Officer  for  ASLE-­‐UKI.    Emily  Alder      Aisha  Nazeer    B5:  Dreams,  Nightmares  and  Enchantments  in  Dreams,  Nightmares  and  Enchantments  in  myth  and  story    Leviathan’s  ecotopian  dream  of  nature  and  machine  in  alliance  Phoebe  Chen  (University  of  Cambridge)  Alternative  histories  are  known  for  their  counterfactual  speculations  as  to  how  scientific  development  and  human  progress  would  have  been  different.  Leviathan  (2009)  by  Scott  Westerfeld  is  a  young  adult  novel  set  in  the  first  world  war,  which  offers  an  alternative  history  of  the  relationship  between  man,  nature,  and  technology.  The  novel’s  premise  is  a  clash  of  two  modes  of  development,  embodied  in  competing  forms  in  the  national  cultures  of  Britain  and  Austria:  genetic  engineering  discovered  by  Charles  Darwin  forms  the  foundation  of  the  British  Empire;  while  diesel  machinery  and  inventions  support  Germany  and  Austria.  When  teen  protagonists  Deryn  and  Alek,  representing  opposing  sides,  join  forces  to  negotiate  peace  between  the  two  world  powers,  they  initiate  the  pragmatic  working  out  of  a  dream  where  nature  and  machine  are  not  at  odds  with  one  another.  In  my  presentation,  I  propose  that  Leviathan’s  historical  alterity  operates  as  the  catalyst  for  imagining  a  utopian  world  that  sees  scientific  progress  and  its  impact  on  man’s  relationship  with  nature  and  technology  in  a  positive  light.  Then,  I  explore  how  the  novel  constructs  an  environmental  utopia  where  technology  enhances  nature’s  capabilities  without  perverting  

its  nature,  form,  and  essence.  Using  the  eponymous  flying  whale  as  an  example,  I  argue  that  the  novel  offers  its  teen  readers  a  revised  ecology,  in  which  man  needs  nature  and  technology  as  much  as  nature  needs  humanity  and  technology  for  their  mutual  survival.    Magic  in  Nature:  Developing  an  Eco-­‐Natural  Theology  within  Children’s  Fantasy  Literature  Meghann  Hillier-­‐Broadley  (University  of  Northampton)    This  paper  will  develop  a  theory  of  eco-­‐natural  theology  utilising  J  R  R  Tolkien’s  essay  ‘On  Fairy  Stories’,  Alister  McGrath’s  renewed  natural  theology  from  The  Open  Secret,  and  aspects  of  eco-­‐criticism  in  Jonathan  Bates’  The  Song  of  the  Earth.    Beginning  with  Tolkien’s  man  as  sub-­‐creator,  this  paper  will  examine  how  man  has  become  part  of  shaping  the  fate  of  creation  through  attitudes  towards  nature,  human  and  non-­‐human  in  children’s  fantasy  literature.    The  theory  of  eco-­‐natural  theology  will  emerge  out  of  Bates’  notion  that  man  yearns  to  return  to  something  he  feels  he  has  lost,  the  primal  ‘state  of  nature’,  which  is  exasperated  by  the  divide  between  nature  and  society.    McGrath’s  renewed  natural  theology  offers  man  a  way  to  return  to  this  ‘primal  state’;  reading  nature  from  a  Christian  perspective  allows  man  to  identify  aspects  of  truth,  beauty  and  goodness  in  nature  through  the  doctrine  of  incarnation,  putting  the  Christian  God  and  creation  at  the  centre,  rather  than  anthropocentric  needs,  allowing  man  to  know  and  respond  to  nature  in  a  different  way.    These  aspects  will  be  examined  in  Tolkien’s  Lord  of  the  Rings  trilogy  and  J  K  Rowling’s  Harry  Potter  series  through  character  and  location  to  highlight  ecological  issues  such  as  the  destruction  of  creation  for  man’s  own  resources.    This  theory  will  create  a  new  way  of  reading  fantasy  literature  with  the  potential  to  identify  a  correlation  between  the  decline  and  degradation  of  the  natural  world  and  man’s  isolation  from  the  Christian  God  and  potentially  discover  solutions  to  return  man  to  nature.    From  the  marvellous  Indies  to  magical  Macondo:  Geopoetical  myths  on  the  Latin  American  natural  world  Francesca  Zunino  (King’s  College  London)    Bridging  ecocriticism  and  ecolinguistics,  this  research  analyzes  how  some  narratological  and  discursive  ‘marvellous’  categories  used  in  Columbus’  earliest  descriptions  of  the  Indies  can  be  traced  in  G.  García  Márquez’  Macondo  (One  Hundred  years  of  Solitude,  1967)  and  its  geopoetics.  Columbus’  first  voyage’s  Letters  (1493)  apply  the  Latin  and  Medieval  mirabile  concept,  stimulating  awe  for  a  deformed,  magical  natural  world.  This  strategy  is  reapplied  in  the  metaphorical  word-­‐place  of  Márquez’  mythical  Macondo  and  its  environment.  Moreover,  Columbus’  rhetorical  over-­‐simplification  of  the  Indian  nature  -­‐  formed  by  one  type  of  luxuriant  landscape,  and  a  verdant  mystery  -­‐  originated  the  mid-­‐XX  century  tropicalist  magical  realism’s  portrait  of  a  monothematic  exotic,  exciting  but  overwhelmingly  wild  forest,  also  charged  with  feminine  clichés.  Both  Columbus’  and  Márquez’  influential  narratives  use  powerful  rhetorical  strategies  such  as  metaphor,  polysyndeton,  hyperbole,  prolepsis,  repetition,  and  circularity,  to  inspire  wonder  towards  an  imaginary  excessive,  timeless  nature.  Additionally,  the  Western  readers’  discovery  of  Macondo  triggered  an  overflow  of  a  prêt-­‐a-­‐porter,  reductionist  ‘Mc  Ondo’  natural  world  in  literary  fiction.  These  hyperbolic,  incommensurable  environment’s  early  modern  ‘invention’  and  modern  re-­‐utilizations  have  established  an  emblematic,  homogenizing  stereotype  for  the  highly  diverse  Latin  American  natural-­‐cultural  ecosystems.  Therefore,  both  Latin  American  literature  and  environmental  imagery  need  a  ‘de-­‐macondization’  process:  this  fictional  nature  can  promote  an  anthropocentric,  ecologically  harmful  disconnection  between  people  and  nature,  as  both  the  Western  and  Latin  American  readers  often  perceive  the  magical  realist  allegorical  pseudo-­‐environment  as  a  space  to  be  tamed  more  than  accurately  known  and  preserved.    

 B5:  Presenter  Biographies    Phoebe  Chen      Meghann  Hillier-­‐Broadley  has  just  entered  her  second  year  as  a  PhD  student  at  the  University  of  Northampton  researching  the  relationship  between  the  fantastic  and  Christianity  in  post-­‐war  children’s  literature.    She  is  also  an  Associate  Lecturer  in  the  English  department  delivering  the  module  Reading  Literary  Genres.    She  previously  studied  at  the  University  of  Hull  for  a  BA  and  MA  in  Theology  and  holds  a  BA  in  English  from  University  of  Northampton.    Francesca  Zunino    B6:  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  2:  Images  of  energy    Crisis!  What  crisis?:  A  review  of  five  decades  of  contradictory  framings  of  energy  and  environment  in  broadcasting    Joe  Smith  (Open  University)    Public  and  political  understandings  and  debates  about  energy  and  environmental  change  have  developed  in  tandem  with  broadcast  representations.  Across  half  a  century  broadcasting  has  offered  diverse  and  sometimes  contradictory  accounts  of  relations  between  society,  energy  and  environment.  The  paper  draws  on  close  readings  of  broadcast  materials;  archival  research  and  semi-­‐structured  interviews  related  to  programming  spanning  the  range  of  energy  narratives  generated  by  broadcasters  over  the  last  half  century.  The  empirical  material  is  drawn  from  the  BBC  broadcast  and  paper  archives.  It  seeks  both  to  connect  sources  and  source  materials  to  completed  radio  and  TV  outputs,  and  to  consider  the  ways  in  which  broadcast  framings  in  turn  might  have  shaped  the  shifting  environmental  politics  of  energy  resources.  The  paper  considers  warnings  of  crisis  and  scarcity,  as  well  as  ambitions  for  stability  and  abundance.  It  explores  shifts  in  the  nature  and  range  of  energy  narratives  over  time,  and  considers  the  specific  role  of  public  service  broadcasting  within  wider  debates  about  energy,  environment  and  social  progress.  It  will  consider  not  just  the  programmes  themselves,  but  also  the  specific  channels  and  transmission  slots,  and  hence  demographics,  being  served  by  these  varied  framings.  In  parallel  with  exploring  the  broadcast  content  the  paper  will  consider  absent  narratives.  What  stories  about  energy  and  society  have  not  been  told,  and  what  other  stories  might  broadcasters  tell  in  future?  The  paper  draws  together  strands  from  two  AHRC  funded  projects:  Stories  of  Change  and  Earth  in  Vision.    Gothic  Energy:  the  iconology  of  energy  in  the  documentary  archive  Helen  Hughes  (University  of  Surrey)    The  history  of  documentary  abounds  with  images  of  energy  production  and  consumption.  Non-­‐fiction  formats  have  contributed  considerably  to  framing  the  debates  about  the  global  development  of  the  coal,  oil,  and  gas  industries,  nuclear  energy,  hydroelectricity,  biofuels,  wind  energy,  and  solar  power.  In  the  course  of  these  efforts  at  representation  and  argument  an  iconography  of  energy  production  and  consumption  has  accumulated  which,  with  time,  has  become  a  great  depository  of  images  of  spent  energy,  reviewing,  recalling  and  reviving  the  projects  and  associations  that  are  now  past.    

This  paper  comes  out  of  a  broader  project  “Gothic  Energy”  exploring  the  documentary  archive  as  the  embodiment  of  spent  energy.  The  kinetic  energy  of  the  moving  image  in  the  present  reanimates  the  world  around  energy  production  and  consumption  including  the  conceptualisation  of  energy  itself  –  the  source  of  warmth,  heat,  light,  and  movement  -­‐  at  the  time  the  film  was  made.  Part  of  the  function  of  documentaries  on  energy  has  been  the  reconnection  of  energy  to  its  sources  once  it  became  more  abstract  in  the  domestic  sphere  through  the  introduction  of  electricity  into  the  home.  This  reconnection  is  now  part  of  a  history  of  ruins,  preserved  architecture,  scarred  landscapes.  The  paper  will  hence  focus  on  the  accumulation  of  the  ghosts  of  energy,  focussing  particularly  on  the  introduction  of  electricity  and  its  role  in  the  changing  architecture  and  infrastructure  of  the  home,  exploring  the  how  the  representation  of  clean  and  invisible  energy  sources  for  the  population  connected  with  the  corporate  desire  to  celebrate  the  achievement  of  the  extraction  of  energy  from  the  earth’s  resources,  reappearing  in  the  documentary  film  archive  as  history.    Energy  biographies:  narrative  genres,  lifecourse  transitions  and  practice  change  Christopher  Groves  (University  of  Cardiff)    The  problem  of  how  to  make  the  transition  to  a  more  environmentally  and  socially  sustainable  society  poses  questions  about  how  such  far-­‐reaching  social  change  can  be  brought  about.  In  recent  years,  lifecourse  transitions  have  been  identified  by  a  range  of  researchers  as  opportunities  for  policy  and  other  actors  to  intervene  to  change  how  individuals  use  energy,  taking  advantage  of  such  disruptive  transitions  to  encourage  individuals  to  be  reflexive  towards  their  lifestyles  and  how  they  use  the  technological  infrastructures  on  which  they  rely.  Such  identifications,  however,  employ  narratives  of  voluntary  change  which  take  an  overly  optimistic  change  of  how  individuals  experience  lifecourse  transitions,  and  ignore  effects  of  experiences  of  unresolved  or  unsuccessful  transitions.  Drawing  on  narrative  interview  data  from  the  Energy  Biographies  project  based  at  Cardiff  University,  we  explore  three  case  studies  where  effects  of  such  unresolved  transitions  are  significant.  Using  the  concept  of  liminal  transition  as  developed  by  Victor  Turner,  we  examine  instances  where  ‘progressive’  master  narratives  of  energy  use  reduction  clash  with  other  ‘narrative  genres’  which  individuals  use  to  make  sense  of  change,  based  on  experiences  of  transition.  These  clashes  show  how  narratives  which  view  lifecourse  transitions  as  opportunities  ignore  the  challenges  that  such  transitions  may  pose  to  individual  identity  and  thereby  to  interventions  which  position  individuals  as  agents  responsible  for  driving  change.    B6:  Presenter  Biographies    Joe  Smith      Helen  Hughes      Christopher  Groves          

Panel  Session  C:  Wednesday  2nd  September  4.45pm-­‐6.15pm  

 C1:  Open  Field  Ecopoetics    “Could  be  anywhere  on  Earth  and  Time”:  Environmental  Consciousness  Mapping  in  the  Poetry  of  Joanne  Kyger  David  Arnold  (University  of  Worcester)    Increasingly,  the  formal  innovations  of  poetry  in  the  modernist  tradition  are  being  recognised  as  benevolent  factors  in  both  the  production  and  critique  of  Green  Knowledge.  If  the  premise  of  ‘open-­‐field’  poetics  is  that  the  page  is  the  space  of  writing,  then  for  Joanne  Kyger  this  writing  also  provides  ‘a  graph  of  a  mind  moving’.  In  this  paper,  I  will  explore  the  implication  of  Kyger’s  ‘consciousness  mapping’  with  her  environmental  and  ethical  concern  for  the  Mexican  regions  of  Oaxaca  and  Pátzcuaro.  Inflected  as  it  is  by  the  Buddhist  doctrine  of  Codependent  Origination,  according  to  which  all  things  arise  simultaneously,  Kyger’s  practice  of  ‘scoring’  mental  phenomena  presents  interesting  possibilities  for  what  Rob  Nixon,  in  Slow  Violence  and  the  Environmentalism  of  the  Poor,  describes  as  “the  temporalities  of  place”.  (2011,  18)  On  the  one  hand,  the  mobility  of  ‘consciousness  mapping’,  its  apprehension  of  transitory  phenomena,  allows  Kyger  to  render  the  sometimes  quick  transition  from  vernacular  to  official  landscapes.  On  the  other  hand,  a  writing  practice  informed  both  by  Olsonian  poetics  and  by  the  doctrine  of  Codependent  Origination  is  well  placed  to  reconfigure  Western  models  of  scale,  to  “…strategically  render  visible  vast  force  fields  of  interconnectedness  against  the  attenuating  effects  of  temporal  and  geographical  distance.”  (Nixon,  2011,  38)  I  will  chart  these  possibilities  in  relation  to  two  short  poetry  collections  by  Kyger:  Pátzcuaro  (1999)  and  God  Never  Dies  (2004).      ‘A  field  folded’:  Green  Knowledge  and  Post-­‐war  American  Poetics  Mandy  Bloomfield  (University  of  Plymouth)    Contemporary  poets  interested  in  engaging  with  ecology,  space  and  place  have  frequently  turned  to  ideas  and  practices  associated  with  post-­‐war  American  ‘open-­‐field’  poetics.  Whether  avowedly  or  more  obliquely,  writers  as  various  as  Harriet  Tarlo,  Evelyn  Reilly,  Allen  Fisher  and  John  Kinsella  have  referred  back  to,  and  reworked,  ‘open  field’  composition.  They  have  done  so  with  a  sharpened  sense  of  ecological  awareness  in  the  context  of  increased  environmental  change  and  degradation.  This  paper  will  examine  why  this  compositional  mode  has  been  so  compelling  for  certain  strands  of  contemporary  ecopoetics.  It  will  examine  the  entwined  aesthetic  and  epistemological  claims  of  the  ‘open  field’  as  articulated  by  a  nexus  of  American  poets,  including  Charles  Olson,  William  Carlos  Williams,  Robert  Duncan  and  Robin  Blaser.  These  poets’  concept  of  ‘field,’  was  informed  by  the  new  scientific  ideas  of  their  day,  most  especially  in  particle  physics.  But  their  understanding  of  this  science  was  also  mediated  by  their  engagement  with  the  process  philosophy  of  Alfred  North  Whitehead.  My  paper  will  explore  how  these  ideas  from  science  and  philosophy  helped  shape  ‘open  field’  poetics.  I  will  investigate  how  these  ways  of  knowing  contributed  to  these  poets’  understanding  of  the  poem  as  a  form  of  dynamic  interchange  between  energy  and  matter,  and  as  oriented  to  a  process  of  discovery.  Drawing  on  examples  from  these  writers’  poetry  and  statements  of  poetics,  I  will  ask:  what  ‘stance  toward  reality’  (Olson)  does  this  poetics  imply?  What  are  the  ramifications  of  the  ‘open  field’  for  ecological  thinking?  What  forms  of  ‘green  knowledge’  does  it  yield?    Open  Field,  Open  Heart:  Explorations  of  Joy  in  Maggie  O’Sullivan  and  Harriet  Tarlo  

Elizabeth-­‐Jane  Burnett  (Newman  University,  Birmingham)    In  her  groundbreaking  anthology  The  Ground  Aslant,  Tarlo  suggests:  “it  is  possible  that  poetry  within  the  experimental  tradition  could  be  particularly  powerful  in  its  contribution  to  the  necessary  mental  and  emotional  adjustments  to  environment  that  we  need,  urgently,  to  make.”15  Such  mental  adjustments  have,  arguably,  become  familiar  terrain  in  the  field  of  ecopoetics,  where  many  practitioners  incorporate  indeterminacy  as  a  formal  constraint  working  to  bring  chance  and  turbulence  into  the  foreground  of  our  Green  Knowledge.16  What  is  less  clear  is  how,  and  where,  emotion  figures  in  these  experimental  poetries  which  resist  habitual  epiphanies.  Olson’s  ‘process’  of  the  open  field  involves  a  spur  to  movement,  to  “keep  moving,  keep  in,  speed,  the  nerves,  their  speed,  the  perceptions”  -­‐  a  kind  of  engaged  liveliness  also  encountered  in  the  poetries  of  O’Sullivan  and  Tarlo,  where  both  poets  re-­‐imagine  the  space  of  the  page  to  enact  simultaneously  sensory,  cognitive,  and  affective  processes.  Through  a  lens  of  poethics  and  affect,  this  paper  focuses  on  the  poets’  exhibits  at  the  ecopoetics  exhibitions  I  curated,  Skylines  (2009)  and  The  Trembling  Grass  (2014),  to  explore  the  ways  that  both  employ  an  open  field  poetics  that  dares  to  access  and  reconfigure  pleasure  at  a  time  of  environmental  pain.    C1  Presenter  Biographies    David  Arnold      Mandy  Bloomfield      Elizabeth-­‐Jane  Burnett      C2:  Poetics  of  Climate    The  Persona’s  Communion  With  Nature  In  Lorna  Crozier’s  Small  Mechanics  Núria  Mina  Riera  (University  of  Lleida)    One  of  the  main  tenets  of  both  ecocriticism  and  ecopoetry  is  the  interconnection  and  interdependence  of  all  the  living  and  non-­‐living  things  in  the  world.  This  interrelationship  is  present  throughout  Lorna  Crozier’s  poetry  by  means  of  the  persona’s  communion  with  nature.  That  is,  the  persona  is  outside,  in  the  street  or  in  nature,  and  she  first  observes  either  animals  or  other  natural  elements  to  gradually  establish  an  interconnection  between  herself  and  the  natural  element,  either  by  a  deep  understanding  of  the  natural  element,  or  by  reproducing  the  howls  of  the  animal  the  persona  is  observing.  The  two  poetry  collections  by  Lorna  Crozier  in  which  the  persona’s  communion  with  nature  figures  more  prominently  are  The  Weather  (1983)  and  Small  Mechanics  (2011).  This  paper  contends  that  Crozier’s  personae  and  their  more-­‐than-­‐human-­‐world  experiences  fit  in  Joni  Adamson  and  Scott  Slovic’s  comment  about  the  state  of  ecocriticism  in  that  Crozier’s  poems  “contribut[e]  to  the  understanding  of  the  human  relationship  to  the  planet”  (Adamson  and  Slovic,  2009:  6).  In  this  sense,  Crozier  asserted  in  an  interview  with  Elizabeth  Philips  that  one  of  the  reasons  why  she  is  so  fond  of  animals  is  that  by  observing  them  she  broadens  her  perception  about  

15 Harriet Tarlo, ed. The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Exeter: Shearsman, 2011, 10. 16 As outlined in  Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.  

the  world  (Philips,  2002:  146).  Actually,  nature  is  portrayed  in  Crozier’s  poems  as  an  entity  that  is  not  tame,  or  a  mere  locus  amoenus,  but  one  which  may  be  dangerous  and  hard  to  live  in.  The  fact  that  Crozier’s  personae  are  able  to  appreciate,  internalise  and  establish  connections  with  an  environment  that  is  both  enchanting  and  challenging  at  the  same  time  implies  a  deep  engagement  to  the  world  that  surrounds  us,  and  ultimately  a  profound  care  about  environmental  concerns.    ‘Is/Is  not’:  Metaphor  and  the  Wonder  of  Climate  Change    Isabel  Galleymore  (University  of  Exeter)    Wonder  is  frequently  understood  as  a  perceptual  mode  that  leads  to  greater  connections  with  natural  environments.  Yet,  in  environmental  literature  there  is  a  fine  line  between  wonder  and  an  author’s  mystical  flight  of  fantasy  that  comes  at  the  expense  of  real  material  environmental  engagements.  Furthermore,  when  considering  how  these  material  environments  are  increasingly  disturbed  by  environmental  issues,  is  it  ethical  to  ignore  these  and  continue  with  this  emphasis  on  wonder?  This  paper  asserts  the  need  for  a  different  theoretical  approach  to  wonder  that  can  inform  a  literary  style  with  which  to  respond  to  environmental  issues.    In  its  capacity  to  make  things  strange,  metaphorical  language  leads  this  investigation.  Turning  to  Adam  Dickinson,  ecocritic  and  poet,  helps  to  draw  out  metaphor’s  relevance  by  showing  how  the  device  affords  an  ‘is/is  not’  dynamic.  This  paper  takes  this  dynamic,  suited  to  perceiving  material  entities  with  an  ethical  uncertainty,  and  shows  its  significant  applicability  to  Morton’s  articulation  of  climate  change  in  Hyperobjects.  Morton’s  discussion  of  the  imperceptible  entity  of  climate  change  and  its  multiple  guises  is  relevant  to  considering  how  metaphor’s  ‘is/is  not’  dynamic  does  not  only  apply  to  real  material  engagements  but  to  engagements  of  real  but  simultaneously  immaterial  environmental  issues.  In  contextualizing  wonder  in  terms  of  perceptual  uncertainty  and  material/immaterial  shape-­‐shifting,  this  paper  shows  how  a  literary  style  based  on  metaphor  is  apt  to  foster  creative  connection  to  environmental  change.      Haiku  and  the  weatherworld:  scientific,  embodied  and  cultural  ways  of  knowing  the  weather  Arran  Stibbe  (University  of  Gloucestershire)    This  is  a  paper  about  the  weather,  or  in  Ingold’s  terms,  the  weatherworld,  since  the  weather  cannot  be  considered  as  something  separate  from  the  trees  whose  branches  bend  in  the  wind  or  people  raising  their  umbrellas  against  the  rain.  It  will  discuss  ways  of  knowing  the  weather  -­‐  scientific,  embodied  and,  most  importantly,  cultural,  and  consider  how  these  ways  can  draw  us  closer  into  the  weatherworld  or  distance  us  from  it.  Against  the  background  of  the  cultural  schemas  which  help  strangers  bond  (‘miserable  day,  isn’t  it!’),  travel  advertisements  which  implore  us  to  escape  to  the  sun,  and  scientific  descriptions  of  autonomous  weather  processes,  this  paper  will  turn  to  Japanese  haiku.  The  question  explored  is  whether  classical  haiku  express  different  cultural  schemas  from  those  which  are  dominant  in  the  UK,  and  whether  they  promote  an  embodied  way  of  knowing  the  weather  that  goes  beyond  culture.  Under  consideration  are  the  poems  of  classical  haiku  poets  including  Basho,  Shiki,  Buson,  Chora,  and  Otsuni,  with  a  special  focus  on  Issa.  The  findings  show  some  overlap  with  dominant  UK  schemas,  but  some  key  differences  as  well,  particularly  in  terms  of  the  detailed  description  and  positive  regard  for  a  far  wider  range  of  weathers.  The  Japanese  poems  use  various  linguistic  techniques  to  depict  embodied  engagement  in  the  weatherworld,  where  weather  becomes  a  way  of  creating  bonds  not  just  with  other  humans  but  also  other  animals,  plants  and  the  physical  environment.  

 C2  Presenter  Biographies    Núria  Mina  Riera  holds  a  BA  degree  in  English  Philology  and  a  Master’s  Degree  on  Teaching  English  at  Secondary  School  Level,  both  of  them  from  the  University  of  Lleida  (Spain).  Currently,  she  is  a  Ph.D.  candidate  of  contemporary  Canadian  poetry  and  an  assistant  lecturer  at  the  same  university.  Her  dissertation  analyses  the  process  of  formation  of  “the  late  style”  in  Lorna  Crozier’s  works  from  an  interdisciplinary  approach  of  aging  and  ecocritical  studies.  As  a  lecturer  at  the  Department  of  English  and  Linguistics,  she  teaches  English  language  in  the  Teacher-­‐Training  programme  for  future  English  teachers,  and  English  poetry,  19th  and  20th  century  history  of  the  United  Kingdom  and  Canadian  and  Australian  culture  to  English-­‐Studies  undergraduates.    Isabel  Galleymore      Arran  Stibbe      C3:  Entomological  thinking  and  writing    Tragicomic  Materialism  around  the  Beehive  in  Charlotte  Jones’  Humble  Boy  Koichiro  Ito  (Independent  Scholar)    In  recent  years,  material  ecocriticism  has  become  increasingly  prevalent  in  literary  and  environmental  studies.  Insects  and  objects  have  begun  to  receive  more  critical  attention.  For  example,  Catriona  Sandilands  argues  that  beekeeping  can  produce  rich  stories  in  terms  of  interspecies  intimacy  and  reciprocity  (2014).  In  Humble  Boy  (2001),  English  dramatist  Charlotte  Jones  presents  a  striking  relationship  between  bees  and  humans  mixed  with  elements  of  tragicomedy.  Drawing  upon  Richard  Dutton’s  notion  of  tragicomedy  as  well  as  Sandilands’  and  Karen  Barad’s  insights  into  nonhuman  and  posthumanist  performativity,  I  will  explore  the  intersection  between  tragicomedy  and  material  ecocriticism,  and  reveal  how  and  why  the  bees  take  charge  of  the  human  characters’  fate  and  love  affairs.  In  the  play,  James  Humble,  a  biologist  and  a  beekeeper,  is  enthusiastic  about  bees  and  their  beehive  partly  because  he  regards  a  beehive  as  “the  blueprint  for  a  Utopia.”  Apparently,  taking  care  of  bees  and  their  beehive  is  more  important  to  him  than  his  wife  Flora’s  flirting  with  their  neighbor  George.  Although  James  is  killed  by  bees,  his  long-­‐term  relationship  with  bees  affects  the  family’s  life  even  after  his  death.  His  obsession  with  bees  leads  Flora,  who  once  frequently  cheated  on  her  husband  with  George  to  come  back  to  her  late  husband,  psychologically.  On  the  other  hand,  disoriented  Flora,  who  reviles  the  geography  of  middle-­‐England  with  its  middle-­‐class  and  rural  setting,  pursues  her  biological  and  social  identity  in  flowers  rather  than  the  queen  bee  in  the  hive.  Furthermore,  I  will  investigate  the  biopolitics  of  bees  and  a  beehive  that  contributes  to  the  form  of  tragicomedy  in  Humble  Boy.    Bee-­‐ing  Human    Niamh  Downing  (Falmouth  University)    Early  visual  and  textual  culture  documents  the  longstanding  interdependency  between  humans  and  bees.17    Bees  continue  to  offer  a  potent  image  of  connectedness  in  an  age  where  ecological  threat  to  their  survival  resonates  with  human  fears  about  our  own.  Nevertheless,  the  use  of  bees,  as  both  labouring  species  and  metaphor  for  human  concerns,   17 See Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 163, on stone bas-relief figures in Egypt dating from 2400 BC, and apian metaphor in Virgil.

tends  to  obscure  their  agency.  A  renewed  interest  in  beekeeping,  particularly  in  non-­‐traditional  contexts  such  as  the  urban,  has  led  to  research  in  the  arts,  humanities  and  social  sciences  that  seeks  to  re-­‐evaluate  the  relationship  between  bees  and  human  beings  from  a  less  anthropocentric  perspective.  Adopting  a  ‘multi-­‐species  ethnographic’  approach,18  such  work  demonstrates  the  importance  of  rethinking  the  dynamic,  mutually  constitutive,  but  uneven  relationship  between  bees  and  humans.19  Bees  and  beekeeping  are  also  popular  subjects  of  non-­‐fiction  prose  (Dave  Goulson,  A  Sting  in  the  Tale),  film  (Markus  Imhoof,  More  than  Honey),  artistic  design  practice  (Aganetha  Dyck,  ‘Guest  Workers’)  and  poetry  (Sean  Borodale,  Bee  Journal),  in  part  due  to  pressing  environmental  crisis.  Borodale’s  own  beekeeping  experiences  are  for  example,  re-­‐codified  as  a  poetic  intervention  in  current  discourses  of  ecological  change  and  multispecies  thinking.  This  paper  explores  such  texts  as  part  of  a  continually  growing  corpus  of  knowledge  about  beekeeping  and  bee-­‐human  relations,  considering  in  what  ways  they  might  suggest  a  kind  of  relational  knowledge  –  produced,  codified,  and  transmitted  at  the  complex  interface  between  species  –  rather  than  solely  by  one  species  (humans)  about  another  (bees).    Microscopic  Knowledge  in  Virginia  Woolf’s  The  Death  of  the  Moth  and  Robert  Musil’s  Das  Fliegenpapier      Simone  Schröder  (University  of  Bath)    Virginia  Woolf’s  nature  essay  The  Death  of  the  Moth  (1942)  and  Robert  Musil’s  prose  sketch  Das  Fliegenpapier  (1914)  both  present  their  readers  with  close-­‐ups  of  insects:  Woolf  observes  a  dying  moth  she  encounters  on  her  windowsill;  Musil  depicts  the  struggle  of  a  fly  that  got  stuck  on  a  piece  of  flypaper.  Both  texts  so  far  have  often  been  discussed  as  allegorical  representations  of  the  human  struggle  with  mortality  against  an  autobiographical  background.  Whereas  Musil’s  essay  seems  to  anticipate  the  horrors  of  the  European  trench  war,  Woolf’s  text  was  read  in  the  light  of  her  own  death.  Although  mortality  is  undeniably  an  important  issue,  captured  in  an  imagery  that  draws  on  the  lexical  fields  of  war  and  death,  it  does  not  explain  the  great  detail  and  microscopic  focus  which  informs  the  animal  depictions  in  both  texts.  In  my  talk,  I  will  propose  a  reading  that  takes  the  fact  serious  that  animals  feature  prominently  in  the  title,  suggesting  that  The  Death  of  the  Moth  and  Das  Fliegenpapier  are  in  as  much  about  insects  as  they  are  about  human-­‐related  is-­‐sues.  Following  Heinz  Drügh  who  revealed  that  Musil’s  Modernist  take  on  microscopic  perspec-­‐tives  helped  to  discover  a  previously  unknown  organ  on  the  fly’s  body,  I  will  argue  that  essayistic  writing  comes  with  its  own  unique  epistemological  potential.  In  keeping  with  Lawrence  Buell’s  observation  that  nature  writing  is  determined  by  a  dual  accountability  to  the  world  of  scientific  facts  and  to  literary  imagination,  I  will  discuss  the  ways  in  which  zoological  knowledge,  poetic  expression,  and  human  meaning  are  interwoven  in  those  texts.    C3  Presenter  Biographies    Koichiro  Ito      

18 S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.’ Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-76 (545). 19 Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut, ‘Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intraspecies mindfulness’ Ethnography (2014); Jake Kosek, ‘Ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.’ Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650-78; Catriona Sandilands, ‘Pro/Polis: Three Forays into the Political Lives of Bees’ in Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014).  

Niamh  Downing  is  Senior  Lecturer  in  English  at  Falmouth  University.  She  completed  her  PhD  at  University  of  Exeter  in  2013  on  the  subject  of  archaeological  poetics  in  contemporary  British  and  Irish  poetry.  She  is  currently  a  Co-­‐I  on  a  newly-­‐funded  AHRC  Connected  Communities  development  project  ‘Telling  the  Bees’,  which  draws  on  models  of  Traditional  Ecological  Knowledge  (TEK),  ecocritical  perspectives,  and  design  practice,  to  critically  investigate  cultural  representations  of  bee-­‐human  relationships  in  folklore,  literature  and  oral  traditions.    Simone  Schröder    Simone  Schröder  read  comparative  literature,  political  science  and  Romance  philology  at  the  University  of  Mainz  where  she  completed  an  M.A.  Since  2014,  Simone  has  been  a  PhD  candidate  at  the  University  of  Bath,  working  on  an  ecocritical  thesis  about  the  poetic  and  epistemological  function  of  the  nature  essay.  Her  research  is  funded  by  the  German  Heinrich  Böll  Foundation.  She  has  published  articles  on  Francesco  Petrarca,  Jack  Kerouac,  Hans  Keilson,  W.G.  Sebald  and  Peter      Handke.      C4:  Post  War  British  and  American  Natural  Histories    A  Nuclear  Nature?  :  Reconsidering  the  relationship  between  “Nature”  and  the  Nuclear  in  Cold  War  American  Literature  and  Science  Sarah  Daw  (University  of  Exeter)    The  paper  focuses  on  the  relationship  between  the  thought  and  work  of  the  New  Mexican  poet  Peggy  Pond  Church  and  the  atomic  scientist  J.  Robert  Oppenheimer.  Church  and  Oppenheimer  were  both  residents  of  Los  Alamos,  and  were  also  correspondents.  This  paper  demonstrates  that  the  poetry  of  Church  and  the  philosophical  reflections  of  Oppenheimer  reveal  comparable,  ecocentric  conceptions  of  the  relationship  between  the  nuclear  and  the  nonhuman  world:  Church  and  Oppenheimer  conceive  of  scientific  knowledge  –  and  specifically  nuclear  development  -­‐  as  a  ‘part  of’  a  greater  nonhuman  world,  rather  than  understanding  them  as  evidence  that  the  human  had  surpassed  or  conquered  “Nature”.  Based  on  archival  research  conducted  in  New  Mexico,  this  paper  demonstrates  that  leading  writers  and  scientists  conceived  of  the  nonhuman  world  as  a  ‘greater  whole’,  within  which  the  human  race  –  in  spite  of  its  newfound  nuclear  capability  –  was  but  a  small  and  insignificant  part.    This  paper  is  taken  from  the  thesis,  ‘Writing  Nature  in  Cold  War  American  Literature’.  It  discovers  the  significant  presence  of  ecocentric  depictions  of  the  relationship  between  the  human  and  the  nonhuman  world  within  literature  from  1945,  troubling  the  positioning  of  Rachel  Carson’s  Silent  Spring  (1962)  as  the  beginning  of  the  modern  environmental  movement.  In  interrogating  the  influences  behind  literary  depictions  of  the  nonhuman  world,  this  work  also  uncovers  the  profound  and  shaping  influences  of  non-­‐Western  and  non-­‐Anglocentric  spiritual  and  philosophical  doctrines  on  American  literary  and  scientific  understandings  of  “Nature”.      How  did  the  English  countryside  turn  into  the  environment?  Nature  writing  1960-­‐1980  Terry  Gifford  (Bath  Spa  University)    Sometime   between   1960   and   1980   the   British   ‘countryside’   metamorphosed   into   ‘the  environment’.  A  post-­‐war  backward  looking  interest  in  literary  ruralism  came  to  be  replaced  by   a  more   serious,   scientific,   sharply   engaged  mode   of   writing.   A   long   timeline   of   British  nature  writers  from  Gilbert  White  to  the  New  Nature  Writers  will  be  followed  by  a  timeline  

of  books  and  events   in   the  period  1960-­‐1980   that   indicate  a  shift   in  British  culture  and   its  nature  writers  towards  environmentalism.  The  urge  for  New  Nature  Writers  such  as  Robert  Macfarlane   to   connect   with   earlier   writers   has   led   to   retrospective   distortions   of   this  period’s   non-­‐fiction   prose   literature.   It   will   be   argued   that   in   the   UK   it   was   not   Rachel  Carson’s  Silent  Spring  (1962)  that  triggered  the  environmental  movement  here,  but  Richard  Mabey’s   The   Common   Ground   (1980).   The   work   of   Derek   Ratcliffe,   for   example,   in  connecting  the  decline  in  the  peregrine  population  and  toxic  pesticides  in  the  UK,  published  in   1963,   which   changed   legislation   here,   has   no   reference   to   Carson’s   writings.   It   will   be  argued   that   the   pastoral   nature   writing   of   H.   V.   Morton   in   England   (1975)   and   Kenneth  Allsop’s   In   the   Country   (1972)   can  be   contrasted  with   the   balancing   of   cultural   needs   and  scientific  evidence   in  Mabey’s  post-­‐pastoral  enquiry  The  Common  Ground.  Twelve  features  of  Mabey’s  book  will   be   identified   in   arguing   for   it   as   fully   engaged  environmental  nature  writing  that  discusses  values,  aesthetics,   land  use  practices  and  government  policy.  Woods  had  become  woodlands  and  fields  had  become  habitats;  culturenature  was  now  demanding  environmental  ethics.    Coal  narratives  in  recent  British  cinema    David  Ingram  (Brunel  University)    The  films  made  by  the  National  Coal  Board  Film  Unit  from  1947  to  1984,  released  on  the  British  Film  Institute’s  DVD  Portrait  of  a  Miner  (2009),  may  be  seen  as  what  David  Nye  calls  ‘energy  narratives’,  constructing  a  cornucopian  narrative  of  coal  as  an  apparently  limitless  energy  resource.  The  last  film  in  the  collection,  40  Years  On  (1978),  ended  with  the  triumphal  claim  that  ‘we  shall  continue  to  win  our  essential  energy  from  under  the  earth,  not  only  for  the  next  40  years,  but  for  the  next  400’.  The  NCB  films  communicated  this  optimistic  view  of  progress  through  images  of  a  ‘technological  sublime’:  powerful  machines  allied  with  managerial  expertise.  In  Greening  the  Media  (2012),  Richard  Maxwell  and  Toby  Miller  argue  that  such  celebrations  of  the  ‘technological  sublime’  are  an  important  means  by  which  media  culture  promotes  an  uncritical  technophilia  which  masks  the  damaging  environmental  consequences  of  unsustainable  technological  change.    2014  saw  the  commemoration  of  the  thirtieth  anniversary  of  the  miner’s  strike  of  1984-­‐5.  In  the  intervening  years,  an  environmentalist  agenda  about  the  contribution  of  burning  fossil  fuels  to  environmental  pollution  and  climate  change  has  emerged  to  augment  earlier  issues  around  health  and  safety.  Do  recent  retrospective  narratives  about  the  strike,  including  those  of  popular  cinema,  reflect  these  discursive  changes?  Many  commemorations  have  revived  familiar  Left  narratives  of  workers’  solidarity,  threatened  community  and  the  dignity  of  manual  labour.  But  do  films  about  mining  and  the  miner’s  strike  frame  ‘Thatcherism’  as  environmental  history?        C4  Presenter  Biographies    Sarah  Daw      Terry  Gifford    Terry  Gifford  is  Visiting  Scholar  at  the  Centre  for  Writing  and  Environment,  Bath  Spa  University  and  Profesor  Honorifico  at  the  University  of  Alicante.  He  is  the  author  of  Ted  Hughes  (2009),  Reconnecting  With  John  Muir:  Essays  in  Post-­‐Pastoral  Practice  (2006),  The  Joy  of  Climbing  (2004),  Pastoral  (1999),  Green  Voices:  Understanding  Contemporary  Nature  Poetry  (2011  [1995]),  editor  of  The  Cambridge  Companion  to  Ted  Hughes  (2011)  and  a  contributor  to  The  Cambridge  Companion  to  Literature  and  Environment  (2014).  A  second  edition  of  Pastoral  is  forthcoming.  

 David  Ingram      C5:  Utterance  disruptions  and  conflicting  knowledge  in  environmental  narratives    Imago  mundi’s  statistical  hybris:  the  mythology  of  environmental  data  Bertrand  Guest  (CERIEC)      At  the  crossroad  of  ecological  and  digital  humanities,  I  would  like  to  question  the  relevance  of  data  patterns  as  a  way  of  knowing  and  of  solving  environmental  issues,  considering  several  problems  such  as  the  growing  ecological  impact  of  a  so  called  immaterial  economy  (data-­‐centers,  transfer  conditions),  but  also  the  very  specific  and  sometimes  socially  unequal  use  which  is  made  of  them,  when  knowledge  becomes  a  product  for  commercial  and  advertising  applications  or  is  utilized  by  insurance  services  which  do  not  always  compensate  poor  inhabitants  for  the  loss  of  their  home  (cf.  Katrina).  In  this  contribution,  I  will  therefore  discuss  the  relevance  of  environmental  data  as  a  language  from  a  literary  perspective,  analyzing  the  epistemological  and  political  ambiguity  which  characterizes  signs  given  as  scientific  and  unambiguous  facts,  though  they  are  often  blended  in  unclear  statements  and  hard  to  read  texts.  While  using  such  data,  who  is  then  doing  what,  to  whom,  and  above  all  with  which  words?  Is  the  claimed  protection  of  the  Earth  not  a  mere  mode  of  social  and  territorial  control?  As  far  as  data  still  requires  a  reader,  which  part  does  there  remain  for  interpretative  work,  when  languages  are  built  which  could  let  us  think  the  world  speaks  on  its  own?  Even  without  tackling  the  ontological  question  of  whether  we  can  still  distinguish  the  world  from  its  image.  I  would  like  to  emphasize  the  epistemological  issue  raised  by  the  new  division  of  labour,  in  which  collection  on  the  field  hardly  remains  a  method  and  is  often  replaced  by  satellite  observation.  I  will  conclude  by  discussing  the  kind  of  critical  reading  required,  especially  when  it  comes  to  environment,  by  data  systems’  peculiar  kind  of  storytelling.    Demoiselles  at  War  –  or  the  Insurrection  of  the  Third  Language  –    Clara  Breteau  (University  of  Leeds)    The  year  1829  saw  the  start  of  one  of  the  eeriest  peasant  revolts  in  French  modern  history,  «  the  Demoiselles’  war  »,  a  mountain  guerilla  aimed  at  earning  back  ancestral  land  rights,  waged  by  peasants  dressed  up  as  women  and  characterized  by  the  deployment  of  a  fantastic  and  poetical  language  across  the  landscape.  Whilst  with  the  new  Forest  Code  the  local  peasants  community  are  bound  to  disband,  the  Demoiselles  conjure  up  their  programmed  disappearance  by  invading  the  forest  with  a  language  of  signs,  marking  a  shift  from  habitation  to  haunting.  This  ecological  crisis  of  a  community  expelled  from  its  land  is  also  at  the  same  time  a  discursive  crisis  with  the  Demoiselles  provocatively  refusing  to  communicate  by  the  State  standards  and  «  codes  ».  While  this  rebellion  is  too  often  approached  in  terms  of  «  folklore  »  or  «  carnival  »  by  academics  or  activists  whom  it  inspires,  we  will  here  suggest  another  reading  of  this  episode  and  protest  form,  leaning  primarily  on  the  outstanding  film  the  director  Jacques  Nichet  devoted  to  it  in  1983,  which  concentrated  on  recreating  the  Demoiselles’  eerie  presence  and  fantastic  sign  dialect.  We  will  argue  that  the  idiosyncratic  and  untamed  «  Third  Language  »  they  develop  echoes  the  knowledge  of  the  mountain  as  a  «  Third  Landscape  »  (Clément,  2004),  this  discarded  and  unruly  portion  of  the  land  they  used  to  inhabit,  while  epitomizing  the  magical  world  structuring  theorized  by  Gilbert  Simondon  (Simondon,  1958).  We  will  finally  look  at  the  Demoiselles’  Existential  Territory  in  Guattari’s  ecosophical  terms  (Guattari,  1989)  and  will  

review  the  questions  such  a  Third  Landscape  raises  in  the  light  of  contemporary  ecological  fights  and  the  various  knowledge  forms  they  mobilize.    On  illness  -­‐  Approaching  speech  impediments  about  nature  via  the  difficulties  of  illness-­‐related  discourse    Nathalie  Blanc  (National  Center  for  Scientific  Research  -­‐  CNRS)    When  finding  out  about  a  disease,  the  supposedly  deep,  analytical  and  accurate  nature  of  the  «  dia-­‐gnosis  »  (literally  «  deep,  discriminating  knowledge  »)  does  not  make  it  less  of  a  challenge  and  a  struggle  for  human  beings  to  spell  it  out  and  make  sense  out  of  it.    Indeed,  just  as  much  as  nature  is  considered  external,  not  only  to  humanity  but  also  to  history,  we  tend  to  relate  to  diseases  in  a  way  that  position  them  as  part  of  the  nature  that  takes  its  meaning  outside  of  us  human  beings,  and  whose  fluctuations  do  not  make  sense.    How  can  we  therefore  understand,  describe,  build  knowledge  about  diseases  ?  To  what  extent  do  these  –  driving  the  parallel  with  nature  further  -­‐  raise  the  challenge  of  inventing  new  knowledge  forms?  Could  the  current  ecological  collapse  be  fruitfully  approached  as  another  «  disease  »  that  we  fail  to  make  sense  of  ?    This  contribution  will  present  the  proceedings  of  an  ongoing  investigation  and  research  program  about  diseases,  their  articulation  to  the  concept  of  nature  and  how  limited  the  knowledge,  languages  and  vocabularies  we  develop  around  them  both  can  be.  The  intervention  will  address  the  lack  of  odes  to  illness  and  of  books  written  in  languages  that  could  invent  and  re-­‐create  nature’senseless  fluctuations.  It  highlights  the  invention  of  pain  diagnosis,  with  specific  ladders  and  vocabulary.  It  questions  what  happens  on  blogs  &  forums.  It  discusses  this  rarity  that  we  have  in  common,  that  is  to  speak  of  the  human  condition  and  breach  the  loneliness  of  a  sensitivity  that  has  no  words  to  be  said.      C5  Presenter  Biographies    Bertrand  Guest  (CERIEC)  works  as  an  Associate  Professor  in  Comparative  Literature  at  the  Université  d’Angers.  A  former  student  of  the  ENS  in  Lyon  and  Université  Montaigne  in  Bordeaux,  he  wrote  his  Phd  on  the  question  of  cosmological  writings  and  revolutionary  politics  in  the  19th  century,  reading  Humboldt,  Thoreau  and  Reclus.  He  is  a  member  of  the  journal  Essais  in  Bordeaux,  takes  part  in  interdisciplinary  research  programs  such  as  “Ecologie  et  Humanités”  in  Bordeaux  and  “Eco  Litt”  in  Angers  and  works  on  the  connections  between  sciences,  literature  and  politics  in  French,  German  and  English-­‐speaking  literatures.  He  took  part  in  several  conferences  among  which  “Performing  Vegetal”  (with  Jean-­‐Pierre  Renou,  Director  of  the  IRHS,  Research  Institute  for  Horticulture  and  Seeds)  and  “What  is  Fiction  Capable  of  Against  the  Environmental  Crisis?”  (with  Emilie  Hache,  Associate  Professor  in  Philosophy,  Université  Paris  X  Nanterre)  and  wrote  several  articles  on  politics,  romanticism,  ecology  and  anarchy.    Clara  Breteau  is  an  AHRC-­‐Whiterose  doctoral  researcher  at  the  University  of  Leeds  in  the  French  department,  with  degrees  from  ESSEC,  La  Sorbonne  and  Cambridge  as  well  as  with  permaculture  training.  Her  POEM  research  –  Poiesis  in  the  Era  of  Metamorphosis  -­‐  focuses  on  theorizing  the  extra-­‐literary  poetics  at  play  in  autonomous  alternative  habitation  forms,  with  the  larger  aim  to  contribute  to  an  ecocritical  recasting  and  reenchantment  of  ecological  stakes.  She  publishes  regularly  in  alternative  ecological  journals  and  has  also  created  a  radio  broadcast  working  out  the  link  between  poetry  and  ecology,  Poems  for  the  Time  Being.  In  2015,  she  will  present  among  others  in  Helsinki,  Finland,  at  the  Culture(s)  in  Sustainable  Futures  international  conference  and  in  Louvain-­‐la-­‐Neuve  (UCL),  Belgium,  at  the  2nd  Interdisciplinary  Symposium  on  Sustainable  Development.  

 Nathalie  Blanc  works  as  a  Research  Director  at  the  French  National  Center  for  Scientific  Research  (CNRS).  She  is  the  Managing  Director  of  the  CNRS-­‐related  LADYSS  laboratory  and  is  based  in  University  Paris  Diderot  7  in  the  Geography,  History  &  Social  Sciences  Department.  She  has  published  various  books  and  coordinated  research  programs  on  nature  in  the  city,  habitability,  environmental  aesthetics,  literature  &  environment,  among  which  :  Vers  une  esthétique  environnementale/Towards  environmental  aesthetics,  Quae,  2008;  Nouvelles  esthétiques  urbaines/New  urban  aesthetics,  Colin,  2012,  Aesthetics  and  public  space/Esthétique  et  espace  public”  published  with  J.  Lolive  in  Cosmopolitiques,  “Litterature  and  ecology”.  “Vers  une  écopoétique/Towards  eco-­‐poetry”  published  jointly  with  T.  Pughe  and  D.  Chartier,  in  Écologie  et  politique;  “Ecoplasties.  Art  et  environnement/  Ecoplasties.  Art  and  Environment”  with  Julie  Ramos,  2010,  Manuella.  She  is  currently  working  on  the  book  Form,  art,  and  environment:  engaging  in  sustainability,  to  be  published  by  Routledge  in  2015.  Since  2011,  she  has  been  the  French  delegate  of  the  European  research  project  Investigating  cultural  sustainability  involving  14  countries.  She  is  also  an  artist  and  an  art  commissionner,  currently  working  on  the  theme  of  ecological  fragility.    C6:  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  3:  Imagining  Energy    Animal,  vegetable,  mineral:  the  energy  systems  of  our  imagined  futures  Bradon  Smith  (University  of  Bath)    Solar  energy  narratives  and  the  figure  of  the  scientist  Greg  Lynall  (University  of  Liverpool)    The  technological  capture  of  the  Sun’s  energy  has  for  centuries  functioned  as  a  compelling  symbol  of  humanity’s  supposed  dominion  over  the  environment.  To  test  the  veracity  of  an  identifiable  ‘solar  energy  narrative’  and  outline  some  of  its  possible  characteristics,  this  paper  will  consider  ways  in  which  the  harnessing  of  solar  energy  is  represented,  figuratively  transformed,  and  structurally  appropriated  in  two  imaginative  texts.  Robert  Heinlein’s  short  story  ‘Let  there  be  light’  (1940)  and  Charles  Morgan’s  play  The  Burning  Glass  (1954)  contemplate  Promethean  scenarios  in  which  the  revealing  of  technological  secrets  by  an  individual  scientist  will  give  humanity  access  to  sublime  forms  of  solar  power.  One  focus  of  the  paper,  therefore,  will  be  the  tropic  value  (both  serious  and  ironic)  of  the  lone,  male,  scientific  ‘genius’.  I  will  explore  what  some  of  the  implications  of  this  individualism  might  be  for  our  readings  of  solar  energy  narratives  more  generally,  and  show  how  the  scientific  framing  of  these  narratives  functions  structurally  and  stylistically.  These  narratives  will  be  read  not  only  within  historically-­‐specific  contexts  of  science,  technology  and  environment,  but  also  in  relation  to  a  long,  myth-­‐laden  tradition  of  historically-­‐transcendent  tropes  associated  with  solar  power.  Whilst  the  recurring  presence  of  Promethean  and  Archimedean  motifs  is  perhaps  not  surprising,  their  inflections  within  different  stories  of  solar  technology  (and  across  different  genres)  remind  us  of  the  complex  fashioning  of  our  responses  to  energy  systems.  Moreover,  I  will  argue  that  solar  energy,  analogized  as  a  kind  of  ‘object’,  does  not  project  a  single  discourse  within  narratives  but  operates  heteroglossically,  functioning  as  both  a  source  of  life  and  destruction;  of  sustainability  and  environmental  catastrophe.    “This  Country  Called  Sustainability”:  Energy  and  Climate  Change  in  Kim  Stanley  Robinson’s  Science  in  the  Capital  Trilogy  Chris  Pak    

Anthropogenic  climate  change  and  the  approach  of  the  peak-­‐oil  moment  has  encouraged  many  to  think  about  alternative  energy  regimes  that  would  provide  a  solution  to  the  threat  of  economic  collapse.  Frederik  Lodewijk  Polak  argues  in  The  Image  of  the  Future  (1973)  that  societies  shape  themselves  partly  through  the  utopian  potential  of  the  image  of  the  future  that  they  construct.  Science  fiction  (sf)  has  portrayed  a  variety  of  images  of  the  future,  from  post-­‐apocalyptic  narratives  of  decline,  techno-­‐utopian  futures  and  ecotopian  images  of  sustainable  societies.  These  narratives  explore  many  instances  of  sustainable  and  unsustainable  practices,  but  issues  of  energy,  oil,  water  and  the  extraction  of  other  resources  have  been  persistent  themes.  Sustainability  science,  future  studies  and  sf  engage  in  different  ways  and  for  different  purposes  in  speculating  about  the  future.  Sf  cannot  offer  predictions,  but  it  can,  as  Dominic  Boyer  and  Imre  Szeman  claim,  act  as  ‘a  forerunner  researching  the  cultural  landscape  around  us  and  imagining  the  future  relationship  between  energy  and  society  that  we  need  to  strive  toward’.*       Kim  Stanley  Robinson  has  consistently  imagined  ecological  futures  that  address  the  relationship  between  politics,  society,  and  science,  and  has  explored  ideas  related  to  the  utopian  potential  of  sustainability  in  the  context  of  climate  change  and  mitigation  strategies  such  as  terraforming,  geoengineering  and  biotechnology.  In  his  Science  in  the  Capitol  trilogy,  he  explores  the  relationship  between  science  and  policy  in  a  near  future  scenario  where  extreme  weather  events  –  a  consequence  of  a  carbon  based  energy  regime  –  realises  the  predicted  effects  of  climate  change.  How  does  the  Science  in  the  Capitol  trilogy  identify  and  analyse  the  problems  associated  with  addressing  the  climate  crisis,  what  sustainable  alternatives  does  it  imagine  and  how  does  it  account  for  failures  to  adequately  institute  new  energy  regimes?      *  Dominic  Boyer  and  Imre  Szeman.  “The  Rise  of  Energy  Humanities:  Breaking  the  Impasse”.  University  Affairs.  2014.  <http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-­‐my-­‐opinion/the-­‐rise-­‐of-­‐energy-­‐humanities/>.    C6  Presenter  Biographies    Bradon  Smith      Greg  Lynall        Chris  Pak  -­‐  Chris  Pak  is  the  editor  of  the  Science  Fiction  Research  Association’s  SFRA  Review  <http://sfra.org/sfrareview>  and  a  researcher  on  the  Leverhulme  funded  corpus  linguistics  project,  “  “‘People’,  ‘Products’,  ‘Pests’  and  ‘Pets’:  The  Discursive  Representation  of  Animals”  (animaldiscourse.wordpress.com).  He  has  published  articles  on  terraforming  in  science  fiction,  sustainability,  climate  change  and  postnationalism.  More  information  and  links  to  published  articles  can  be  found  at  chrispak.wix.com/chrispak.                

Panel  Session  D:  Thursday  3rd  September  9.00am-­‐10.30am  

 D1:  University  of  Essex  ‘Wild  Writing  ‘  Panel    Rethinking  our  relationship  with  nature  –  the  role  of  literature  in  raising  awareness  and  changing  attitudes  Melinda  Appleby  (University  of  Essex)  The  relationship  between  humans  and  the  non-­‐human  world  has  long  been  a  subject  of  interest  and  analysis  for  environmental  writers.  Its  contentiousness  is  captured  and  reflected  in  literature  from  across  the  centuries.  Areas  of  debate  include  whether  humans  are  part  of,  or  apart  from,  a  perceived  “nature,”  and  whether  there  is  any  legitimacy  to  humankind’s  stewardship  of  the  non-­‐human  world.  Ethics  involves  avoiding  or  minimalizing  damage  to  others.  While  we  depend  on  nature  beyond  our  own  species  to  sustain  life,  we  also  need  to  protect  our  own  interests  in  order  to  survive.  The  problem  lies  in  balancing  human  and  other  interests,  in  an  anthropocene  age.              Literature  explores  and  debates  the  relationship  between  humans  and  non-­‐humans  in  ways  that  can  be  pivotal  in  changing  attitudes.  However,  the  viewpoints  expressed  by  writers  reflect  the  environmental  circumstances,  depth  of  knowledge  and  cultural  norms  that  prevail  at  the  time  of  writing.  Drawing  on  works  from  the  1800s  to  1900s  and  from  Britain  and  America,  this  paper  will  compare  approaches  to  the  non-­‐human  world  which  treat  it  as  a  resource,  a  community  and  a  source  of  spiritual  refreshment.  I  will  examine  texts  from  five  writers  who  in  different  ways  demand  a  rethinking  of  our  relationship  with  nature:  John  Burroughs,  John  Clare,  Edward  Thomas,  Aldo  Leopold  &  Henry  David  Thoreau.  All  the  texts  exemplify  practical,  emotional  and  philosophical  responses  to  the  non-­‐human  world  while  drawing  attention  to  their  own  limitations.    “For  ten  winters  I  followed  him”:  obsession  in  J.  A  Baker’s  The  Peregrine  and  Helen  Macdonald’s  H  is  for  Hawk  Miranda  Cichy  J.  A.  Baker’s  1967  The  Peregrine  (1967)  is  now  recognised  as  a  seminal  text  of  modern  nature  writing,  while  Helen  Macdonald’s  H  is  for  Hawk  (2014)    has  redefined  the  genre.  Ostensibly,  both  books  have  the  same  subject:  human  obsession  with  birds  of  prey.  Yet  while  they  are  bound  by  this  common  theme,  the  origin  and  shape  of  these  obsessions  are  quite  different.  Using  the  Baker  archive  at  the  University  of  Essex  –  featured  in  Robert  Macfarlane’s  Landmarks  (March  2015)  –  this  paper  analyses  the  author’s  journals,  private  correspondence  and  the  testimony  of  friends  and  acquaintances  to  explore  how  The  Peregrine  was  borne  not  simply  out  of  a  love  of  birds,  but  also  intense  literary  ambition.  It  contrasts  this  with  the  personal  obsession  closely  detailed  by  Macdonald  in  her  blend  of  biography,  memoir  and  nature  writing  in  H  is  for  Hawk.  The  absence  of  Baker  from  his  text  has  led  to  much  speculation  on  his  reasons  for  tracking  his  accipitrine  subjects,  with  writers  such  as  Mark  Cocker  concluding  that  The  Peregrine  was  Baker’s  emotional  eulogy  for  the  birds  that  were  then  rapidly  declining  in  numbers.  My  archive  research  supports  the  argument  that  it  was  equally  Baker’s  understanding  of  the  peregrine  as  an  icon  of  extinction  –  and  the  literary  weight  that  this  would  lend  –  that  led  him  to  choose  it  as  his  subject  matter.        Heligoland:  Wild  Writing  and  the  island  Elaine  Ewart  (University  of  Essex)    

How  can  we  tell  the  stories  that  lie  beneath  the  surfaces  of  landscape  and  of  water?    I  explore  this  question  with  reference  to  my  own  work  on  the  subject  of  Heligoland,  in  the  new  nature  writing  genre,  which  won  second  prize  in  the  New  Welsh  Writing  Awards  2015.    Heligoland,  a  small  archipelago  in  the  North  Sea,  has  been  a  site  of  destruction  and  displacement  during  and  after  two  world  wars:  the  islands  have  suffered  devastating  acts  of  violence  by  the  British  military  authorities  and  their  population  has  undergone  two  forced  evacuations.    Heligoland  has  also  been  a  locus  of  migration  and  connection,  a  stopping-­‐over  place  for  both  birds  and  people,  and  a  focal  point  for  the  exchange  of  cultural,  artistic  and  scientific  ideas.    I  interrogate  my  own  work  of  non-­‐fiction,  Heligoland:  an  ecology  of  exile,  a  creative  analysis  of  my  visit  to  the  islands  in  June  2014.  My  work  consciously  responds  to  W.G.  Sebald’s  walking  tour  of  the  Suffolk  coast  in  The  Rings  of  Saturn  (1999).    I  explore  the  ways  in  which  the  hidden  narratives  of  a  landscape  destroyed  by  war,  and  then  rebuilt,  can  be  read,  interpreted  and  represented.    I  engage  with  new  nature  writers  such  as  Robert  Macfarlane  and  Kathleen  Jamie,  whose  pioneering  ways  of  writing  about  the  relationship  between  humans  and  the  rest  of  nature  experiment  both  with  form  and  subject  matter.    I  also  use  forms  of  investigation  found  in  the  rural  psychogeographical  tradition,  where  authors  such  as  Sebald  have  explored  how  memory,  particularly  violent  memory,  is  inscribed  upon  landscape.        D1  Presenter  Biographies    Melinda  Appleby      Miranda  Cichy      Elaine  Ewart      D2:  If  we  could…    The  Issue  of  Human-­‐animal  Distinction  in  Contemporary  Chinese  Animal  Fiction  (1990  onwards)  Chen  Hong  (Shanghai  Normal  University)    Animal  fiction  in  China  from  1990  onwards  began  to  deal  with  the  human-­‐animal  relationship  from  wider  and  deeper  perspectives  than  before.  Whereas  Chinese  market  economy  brought  about  severe  conflicts  between  economic  development  and  environmental  protection  or  animal  protection  in  particular  in  many  cases,  extreme  ways  of  mistreating  animals  and  revenges  animals  take  onto  human  beings  become  frequent  subjects  of  many  of  the  animal  writings  of  the  period.  Writers  also  experimented  on  narratives  to  better  explore  the  animal  world  or  to  test  the  authenticity  of  the  borderline  between  human  and  animal.  The  authors  of  this  paper  choose  five  major  contemporary  writers  who  are  thought  to  best  represent  good  animal  fiction  produced  between  1990  and  2010  in  China.  In  examining  their  works,  the  authors  focus  on  the  issue  of  human-­‐animal  distinction  because  of  the  central  and  crucial  place  it  occupies  in  our  grasp  of  the  human-­‐animal  relations,  whether  by  way  of  philosophical  thinking,  scientific  observation,  or  artistic  and  literary  representation.  A  brief  survey  of  important  thoughts  about  human-­‐animal  distinction  in  Chinese  and  Western  philosophies  convinces  the  authors  that  it’s  reasonable  to  set  certain  criteria  for  good  animal  writings,  which  when  all  met  would  create  an  ideal  

case  in  which  animals  are  no  longer  separated  from  humans  in  any  essential  way  while  at  the  same  time  show  characteristics  peculiar  both  to  their  species  and  themselves  as  individuals.  After  a  careful  study  of  the  texts  by  Zhang  Wei,  Ye  Guangqin,  Jiang  Rong,  Jia  Pingwa  and  Guo  Xuebo,  the  authors  come  to  the  observation  that,  all  these  writers  have  destabilized,  to  varying  degrees,  the  boundary  between  humans  and  animals,  and  by  doing  so,  they  greatly  challenge  our  anthropocentric  view  regarding  non-­‐human  animals  and  encourage  us  to  relate  to  them  morally,  responsibly,  and  equally.      Negotiating  Anthropomorphism  in  Talking-­‐Animal  Stories  Anja  Höing  (University  of  Osnabrueck)    Anthropomorphic  animal  representations,  especially  present  in  children’s  animal  stories,  have  always  been  a  disputed  topic.  Literary  criticism  tends  to  disregard  talking-­‐animal  stories  as  sentimental,  but  nonetheless  they  are  well-­‐established  ways  of  transmitting  green  knowledge–  or  green  prejudice?  Proponents  of  talking-­‐animal  stories  state  that  anthropomorphisms  help  us  grasp  a  natural  world  otherwise  inaccessible  to  our  necessarily  anthropocentric  perception,  while  opponents  see  dangers  in  “the  animal”  becoming  a  metaphorical  construct  symbolizing  human  plights.  Controversially,  juxtaposing  “the  animal  [hero]”  against  “the  human  [Other]”,  might  allow  reading  animal  protagonists  not  as  metaphorical  of  humans,  but  of,  indeed,  animals.  Talking-­‐animal  stories  further  might  raise  awareness  for  issues  such  as  habitat  destruction  and  population  displacement,  but  yet  –  targeted  at  children  and  thus  generally  ending  happily  –  they  might  achieve  the  opposite  effect,  perpetuating  the  myth  that  animals  will  always  cope.  All  these  arguments,  however,  pre-­‐suppose  the  existence  of  a  clear-­‐cut  nature/culture-­‐  and  animal/human  boundary.  Yet  it  is  precisely  these  boundaries  that  talking-­‐animal  stories  transgress  and  often  expose  as  artificial  dichotomies.  Such  discussions  thus  finally  create  another  problematic  artificial  concept:  “the  anthropomorphic  animal”.  Applying  Garrard’s  differentiation  between  critical  and  crude  anthropomorphism  to  the  genre,  I  argue  that  depending  on  the  way  anthropomorphism  is  employed,  talking-­‐animal  stories  might  both  prove  an  asset  to  “knowing”  the  natural  world  or  lead  to  “unknow”  it.  The  genre  can  perpetuate  anthropocentric  myths  as  well  as  dismantle  them.  A  critical  awareness  of  the  mechanism  of  anthropomorphism  in  talking-­‐animal  stories  can  thus  immensely  add  to  the  wealth  of  Ecocritical  thinking.    Ways  of  learning:  Animal  mediators  of  knowledge  and  liberation  in  The  Wind  on  the  Moon  Karin  Molander  Danielsson  (Mälardalen  University)    Non-­‐human  animal  characters  in  stories  for  children  historically  have  a  didactic  purpose,  often,  as  in  fables,  to  expose  the  human  through  the  behavior  of  the  non-­‐human  (cf.  Fudge  2002)  or  to  advocate  control  of  unwanted  behavior  (Rudd  2009).  Sometimes,  as  in  Kipling’s  The  Jungle  Book,  although  the  animal  characters  do  not  escape  anthropomorphism,  they  teach  the  child  character,  and  the  reader,  as  much  about  the  natural  world,  as  about  human  life.    Possibly  inspired  by  The  Jungle  Book,  and  exhibiting  even  more  interesting  examples  of  non-­‐human  teachers,  Eric  Linklater’s  The  Wind  on  the  Moon  (1944),  Carnegie  medal  winner  and  still  in  print,  remains  curiously  neglected  by  scholars.  Given  its  wartime  publication,  the  novel’s  celebration  of  freedom  and  its  plot  of  a  series  of  liberations  of  political  prisoners,  are  not  surprising.  However,  here  the  motif  of  human  imprisonment  is  strongly  connected  to  that  of  zoo-­‐animals.  Moreover,  as  the  children  liberate  animals  and  other  prisoners,  they  also  unlock  knowledge  about  nature,  the  lives  of  animals,  and  different  ways  of  learning.  The  

unfocused  and  irrelevant  teachings  of  their  governess  are  contrasted  against  the  mindful  and  essential  knowledge  mediated  by  the  puma  and  the  falcon:  how  to  see  and  listen,  how  to  find  your  way,  and  how  to  value  freedom.    This  paper  discusses  how  The  Wind  on  the  Moon  connects  learning  to  the  liberation  of  body  and  mind,  and  to  the  value  of  the  teachings  of  nature  and  non-­‐human  animals.    D2  Presenter  Biographies    Chen  Hong      Anja  Höing  studied  English  and  Biology  at  the  University  of  Osnabrück,  Germany.  She  obtained  her  B.A.  in  2009,  followed  by  a  Master  of  Education  (M.  Ed.)  in  2011,  and  is  now  employed  as  a  research  assistant  at  the  institute  of  English  and  American  Studies  at  the  University  of  Osnabrück,  where  she  is  working  on  her  PhD  on  religion  and  culture  in  English  animal  stories.  Her  main  research  interests  lie  in  the  fields  of  animals  in  literature,  especially  talking  animal  stories,  representations  of  nature,  ecosystems  and  environmentalism  in  literature,  children’s  literature,  and  interfaces  between  literature  and  the  natural  sciences.  She  presented  first  findings  at  the  “Cosmopolitan  Animals”  conference  organized  by  the  University  of  Kent  in  2012.  In  2013  she  contributed  to  the  ASLE-­‐affiliated  postgraduate  workshop  “Environment,  Literature,  Culture”  in  Frankfurt  am  Main,  Germany.  In  2014,  she  read  a  paper  on  the  topic  of  “Snit’s  a  good  Dog  –  Dogs’  Innate  Duty  in  Richard  Adams’s  The  Plague  Dogs”  at  the“1st  Global  Conference:  The  Animal  and  Human  Bond”  by  Inter-­‐Disciplinary,  held  in  Mansfield  College,  Oxford,  and  since  published  in  Who’s  Talking  Now  –  Multispecies  Relations  from  Human  and  Animals’  Point  of  View  .  She  also  presented  her  research  at  the  University  of  Sheffield’s  2014  “Reading  Animals”  conference,  where  she  read  a  paper  on  “Writing  Animals:  Culture  Transmission  in  Talking  Animal  Stories”.    Karin  Molander  Danielsson  is  a  senior  lecturer  in  English  at  Mälardalen  University  in  Västerås,  Sweden,  where  she  teaches  English  and  American  literature,  ecocriticism,  and  Academic  writing.  Her  research  interests  include  animal  studies,  ecocriticism,  American  literary  naturalism  and  children’s  literature.      D3:  EcoPoetics    Writing  and  Reading  Poetry:  Possession,  Listening  and  Ecology  Garry  MacKenzie  (University  of  St  Andrews)    This  paper  will  take  as  its  starting  point  Susan  Stewart’s  theory  of  ‘lyric  possession’:  that  a  poem’s  formal  construction  isn’t  merely  a  demonstration  of  technical  mastery,  but  also  a  means  for  the  poet  to  undergo  a  ‘submersion  of  will’.  Poets  can  be  led  in  surprising  directions,  Stewart  argues,  by  the  latent  energies  and  histories  of  a  particular  form  or  metre.  Therefore,  ‘by  acknowledging  the  ways  in  which  we  are  spoken  through,  we  are  bound  to  hear  more  than  we  meant  to  say’.  For  ecocritics,  this  suggests  that  in  a  poem  knowledge  of  the  phenomenal  world  is  not  simply  a  set  of  environmental  ideas  communicated  by  the  poet.  Knowledge  is  also  synthesised  and  contained,  for  example,  in  the  poem’s  aesthetic  composition  and  linguistic  ambiguities,  and  these  factors  make  it  different  from  other  textual  forms.    Turning  to  one  of  Stewart’s  own  poems,  ‘The  Owl’,  I  will  consider  how  listening,  subjectivity  and  ambiguity  are  fundamental  to  perception  of  the  non-­‐human  world  and  also  to  the  creative  acts  of  writing  and  reading  poetry.  I  will  draw  on  ecocritical  theory  including  Jonathan  Bate’s  ecopoesis  and  Timothy  Morton’s  contention  that  ‘ecocriticism  has  

overlooked  the  way  in  which  all  art  –  not  just  explicitly  ecological  art  –  hardwires  the  environment  into  its  form’.  I  will  suggest  that  ‘listening’  to  form  and  language  as  a  means  of  composition,  as  well  as  the  more  familiar  model  of  listening  as  attentiveness  to  the  natural  world,  might  undermine  the  notion  of  a  stable  poetic  statement  open  to  hermeneutic  ecocritical  examination.    Green  Knowledge  in  Baudelaire's  "Brumes  et  pluies"  Daniel  Finch-­‐Race  (University  of  Cambridge)    Amid  the  hubbub  of  Georges-­‐Eugène  Haussmann's  extensive  restructuring  of  Paris,  Charles  Baudelaire  crafted  the  provocative  vignettes  of  Les  Fleurs  du  mal.  Following  condemnation  of  the  collection  for  obscenity  two  months  after  its  release  in  1857,  Baudelaire  resolved  to  revise  the  work.  The  second  edition,  issued  in  1861,  contained  a  new  second  section,  the  'Tableaux  parisiens',  inspired  by  the  chaotic  circumstances  of  metropolitan  life  during  the  Second  Empire.  'Brumes  et  pluies',  the  sixteenth  piece  in  the  new  section,  featured  in  the  1857  edition,  and  its  relocation  raises  the  stakes  of  the  sonnet  depicting  a  pair  of  meteorological  phenomena  that  signal  the  transitional  periods  of  the  year.    Peculiarities  of  versification  (several  caesurae  are  submerged;  the  majority  of  the  rhymes  are  weak)  augment  the  melancholy  that  pervades  the  narrator's  apostrophe  of  the  seasons,  suggesting  detachment  from  the  non-­‐human  world.  Framed  by  the  assertion  that  the  oblivion  of  winter  is  as  enticing  as  a  fleeting  liaison  with  another  human,  the  conclusion  of  the  piece  is  imbued  with  a  splenetic  ambience  due  to  the  narrator's  desperate  attempt  to  find  release  from  his  urban  torment  (figured  in  terms  of  his  soul  taking  flight  in  the  manner  of  a  raven).  It  will  ultimately  be  demonstrated  that  'Brumes  et  pluies'  evokes  an  idiosyncratic  kind  of  green  knowledge  arising  from  alternative  forms  of  human-­‐nature  relations  that  become  necessary  in  the  latter  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  because  of  the  difficulties  involved  in  achieving  unmitigated  contact  in  an  increasingly  metrocentric  world.      Poetic  ecologies  and  the  contemporary  lyric  Daniel  Weston  (University  of  Hull)    Lyric  expression  and  ecological  thinking  are  often  thought  to  have  a  problematic  relationship.  Experimental  landscape  poetry  commonly  dispenses  with  the  explicit  presence  of  the  lyric  ‘I’  observing  the  world  in  the  poem  (even  if  its  implicit  influence  is  more  difficult  to  eradicate).  Much  of  the  accompanying  critical  work  is  also  censorious  of  the  supposed  anthropocentric  tendencies  of  lyric  form.  Likewise,  when  textual  ecology  is  considered  –  the  shape  of  the  poem  on  the  page,  the  spatial  and  sonic  relationship  that  its  parts  bear  to  one  another  –  it  is  often  found  that  a  freer  verse  style  reflects  real-­‐world  ecologies  better  by  escaping  the  artificial,  cultural  constructs  of  metered  verse,  and  replacing  them  with  more  ‘natural’  free  verse  rhythms.  However,  these  lines  of  thinking  might  not  take  advantage  of  the  fullest  sense  of  ‘ecology’.  This  paper  argues  that  the  continued  presence  of  inherited  (‘traditional’)  poetic  voicing  and  form  has  been  overlooked.  A  number  of  poets  are  noticing  the  way  in  which  they  can  be  harnessed  –  adapted  rather  than  slavishly  adhered  to  –  in  creating  poetic  ecologies.  In  particular,  I  look  at  sonnets  or  sonnet-­‐like  forms  in  recent  poems  explicitly  concerned  with  nature,  place,  and  environment  by  Jo  Shapcott,  Jen  Hadfield,  and  Kathleen  Jamie.  In  light  of  the  environmental  concerns  that  these  poets  address,  the  ghost  of  metre  to  be  found  in  their  work  might  signal  an  uneasy  relationship  between  human  ‘cultural’  and  non-­‐human  ‘natural’  actors  in  ecology.  I  aim  to  articulate  the  potentials  of  a  reconstructed  lyric  that  are  sometimes  neglected  in  critical  discussion.    

D3  Presenter  Biographies    Ros  Ambler-­‐Alderman  Rosalind  Alderman  is  a  PhD  student  at  Southampton  University.  Her  research  explores  the  parallels  between  ecological  and  textual  systems,  with  an  emphasis  on  complexity  and  emergence.  In  particular,  she  has  been  focusing  on  work  by  the  Language  writers  Lyn  Hejinian  and  Joan  Retallack  and  contemporary  ecopoets  Marcella  Durand,  Juliana  Spahr  and  Jonathan  Skinner,  as  well  as  British  landscape  poets  such  as  Colin  Simms.    Garry  MacKenzie      Daniel  Finch-­‐Race  is  a  Research  Scholar  at  Trinity  College  in  the  University  of  Cambridge.  His  work  primarily  pertains  to  versification  and  ecocriticism.  His  articles  examine  ecopoetic  ruminations  in  Baudelaire's  'Je  n'ai  pas  oublié'  and  'La  Servante  au  grand  cœur'  ('Green  Letters',  2015),  and  ecosensitivity  in  Rimbaud's  'Comédie  de  la  soif'  ('Interdisciplinary  Studies  in  Literature  and  Environment',  2015).  He  co-­‐edited  a  special  issue  of  'Dix-­‐Neuf'  on  ecopoetics  (2015),  to  which  he  contributed  an  article  on  the  alterity  of  nature  in  Verlaine's  'Ariettes  oubliées'.  He  organised  the  first-­‐ever  conference  on  French  ecocriticism  (2015).    Daniel  Weston  is  Lecturer  in  Twentieth-­‐Century  English  Literature  at  the  University  of  Hull.  His  research  focuses  on  literary  representations  of  landscape,  place,  and  environment,  with  particular  emphasis  on  contemporary  writing  in  a  number  of  different  forms  (poetry,  fiction,  non-­‐fiction).  He  is  interested  in  interdisciplinary  methodologies,  and  has  worked  to  integrate  literary  studies  and  cultural  geography.  His  newest  work  considers  ecology  and  literary  form.  He  has  written  several  book  chapters  and  articles  have  appeared  in  Cultural  Geographies,  Journal  of  D.H.  Lawrence  Studies,  Textual  Practice,  and  are  forthcoming  in  Contemporary  Literature  and  C21  Literature.    D4:  Ways  of  knowing  place    Environmental  Localism  Rediscovered:  Global  Sense  of  Place  in  Helon  Habila’s  Oil  on  Water  and  Amitav  Ghosh’s  The  Hungry  Tide  Lenka  Filipova    In  light  of  the  recent  shift  in  ecocritical  thought  towards  cosmopolitan  and  global  system  theories,  the  paper  challenges  the  domination  of  the  rhetoric  of  the  global  and  the  marginalisation  of  the  local.  It  considers  the  significance  of  the  broad  and  evasive  notion  of  “place”  in  environmentalism,  specifically  with  respect  to  wider  socio-­‐economic  relations  of  particular  places  and  the  agency  of  the  non-­‐human.  The  rejection  of  the  global  and  its  seamless  integration  into  the  local,  which  has  been  manifested  through  various  forms  of  “ethics  of  proximity”  (Heise,  2008)  in  the  environmental  discourse,  has  until  recently  posed  both  conceptual  and  political  difficulties.  Yet,  I  argue  that  to  some  extent,  environmental  responsibilities  and  political  action  in  times  of  global  environmental  crisis  are  still  bound  to  particular  places.  The  primary  focus  of  the  paper  is  on  two  novels  –  Helon  Habila’s  Oil  on  Water  and  Amitav  Ghosh’s  The  Hungry  Tide  –  and  their  literary  recreation  of  place.  While  making  references  to  Doreen  Massey’s  “progressive  sense  of  place”,  Arran  Gare’s  theories  of  inchoate  environmental  narratives,  and  Paul  Carter’s  distinction  between  mimesis  and  methexis,  the  discussion  shows  that,  without  exhibiting  signs  of  “echo-­‐parochialism”  (Nixon  2011),  the  novels  provide  a  sense  of  the  local  as  process.  They  offer  an  alternative  ontology  of  place  which  accounts  for  both  local  and  global  social  relations  of  place,  opposes  the  categories  of  abstract  calculation,  and  calls  for  new  forms  of  ethical  relationality:  an  ethics  of  

entanglement  which  implies  an  understanding  of  culture  and  place  as  “something  nature  does”  (Barad  2012).      “Somewhere  very  else”:  exploring  knowing  and  relationships  with  real  and  fantastic  place  through  China  Miéville’s  Un  Lun  Dun  Chris  Hussey  (University  of  Cambridge)    Place  is  essential  in  texts  and  in  our  lives:  it  is  where  the  narrative  occurs.  Whilst  many  theories  look  to  explain  how  we  identify  with  and  become  attached  to  place,  it  becomes  more  complex  when  such  places  are  intangible  or  unreachable.  Children’s  literature  brims  with  fantastic  places  that  have  captured  the  imagination  of  countless  people  over  the  years,  such  as  Hogwarts  and  Wonderland.  However,  I  am  moved  to  explore  how  readers  respond  to  fantastic  portrayals  of  real  places,  questioning  how  individuals  can  come  to  know  and  form  a  relationship  with  a  place  that  they  cannot  visit,  as  well  as  understanding  how  this  influences  their  relationship  with  real  places  also.  Miéville’s  Un  Lun  Dun  (2007)  offers  a  platform  to  explore  this  through  representations  of  the  city  of  London,  and  its  counterpart  UnLondon.  This  contemporary  text  challenges  both  the  traditional  quest  narrative  structure  and  wilfully  plays  with  the  limitless  possibilities  of  fantasy.  The  intersection  between  real  and  fantastic  portrayals  of  London  invites  exploration  as  to  what  this  offers  a  reader  of  the  text,  especially  in  relation  to  the  lived  experience  of  children  within  London,  engaging  with  how  one  may  form  such  relationships  and  how  this  may  influence  their  identity.  Utilising  ecocritical  and  geocritical  theory  to  explore  the  construction  of  place  within  this  text,  as  well  as  drawing  from  my  empirical  work  on  relationships  with  place,  I  hope  to  bring  about  a  greater  understanding  of  the  ways  in  which  notions  of  place-­‐identity  are  formed  in  relation  to  texts  and  representations  of  place.      ‘The  Thing  to  be  Known  Grows  with  the  Knowing’:  Knowing  Place  in  the  Work  of  Nan  Shepherd  Samantha  Walton  (Bath  Spa  University)    This  paper  will  discuss  the  work  of  the  Scottish  modernist  writer,  Nan  Shepherd.    Her  novels  and  mountaineering  memoir,  The  Living  Mountain,  are  located  in  the  recognisable  locales  of  the  Cairngorms  mountain  range,  yet  her  landscapes  are  poised  between  the  topologies  of  the  known  and  charted  and  the  mysterious:  mutable,  ever  changing,  and  ultimately  unknowable.  Shepherd  was  a  pioneer  of  regional  modernist  writing,  which  tapped  into  international  innovations  in  literary  representation  of  lived  experience,  whilst  also  drawing  from  a  long  and  local  tradition  of  ecological  thinking  in  Scottish  literature  and  culture.  In  her  novels,  Shepherd  explores  the  dense  web  of  connections  made  in  rural  communities  between  individuals,  communities  and  the  land,  using  modernist  techniques  for  representing  enactive  minds  in  dialogue  with  their  surroundings.  Her  writing  explores  the  meaning  of  places  to  those  who  dwell  in  them,  at  the  same  time  as  it  meditates  on  the  notion  of  'Being'  and  the  ways  in  which  we  orientate  ourselves  in  relation  to  the  natural  world,  prefiguring  phenomenological  thought  and  late  twentieth  century  critical  understandings  of  deep  ecology.  This  paper  will  contribute  to  the  conference  theme  of  ‘Ways  of  knowing:  scientific,  cultural,  metaphysical,  religious’,  by  considering  how  Shepherd's  knowledge  of  the  natural  world—whilst  emphatically  never  total  and  always  flawed—is  attempted  through  a  rich  nexus  of  interconnecting  and  conflicting  ways  of  knowing:  derived  from  Scottish  literature  and  geography,  rural  culture  and  folk  traditions,  Zen  Buddism  and  botany,  and  most  importantly,  lived  experience,  and  the  dedicated  attunement  of  sense,  imagination  and  intellect  to  the  natural  world.    

D4  Presenter  Biographies    Lenka  Filipova  is  currently  a  PhD  candidate  and  an  assistant  lecturer  at  the  Free  University  of  Berlin.  Her  doctoral  dissertation  examines  the  notion  of  place  in  environmental  discourse,  with  a  special  focus  on  contemporary  concepts  and  representations  of  place  that  do  not  resort  to  forms  of  local  conservatism  and  that  effectively  negotiate  the  local  and  global  socio-­‐economic  and  environmental  relations  of  particular  places.  Her  research  interests  include  environmental  humanities,  postcolonial  studies,  theories  of  space  and  place,  and  travel  writing  from  the  18th  century  onwards.    Chris  Hussey  came  up  study  Education  with  English  and  Drama  at  the  University  of  Cambridge  in  2008,  and  enjoyed  it  so  much  that  he  wanted  to  continue  collecting  letters  after  his  name,  pursuing  his  research  interests  for  as  long  as  possible.  After  his  undergraduate  degree,  he  studied  for  a  Primary  PGCE  and  then  for  the  Children’s  Literature  Master  of  Education,  before  embarking  on  his  PhD  journey.  He  currently  balances  part-­‐time  study  with  working  for  Early  Education,  a  charity  based  in  London,  allowing  him  to  indulge  both  his  love  of  children’s  literature  and  education  at  every  possible  opportunity.    Samantha  Walton      D5:  Eighteenth  and  Nineteenth  Century  Encounters      Songs  and  Voices:  Understanding  Birdlife  in  Eighteenth-­‐century  Ireland  Lucy  Collins  (University  College  Dublin)    The  eighteenth  century  was  a  period  of  sustained  reflection  on  the  relationship  between  humans  and  the  natural  world.  Animal  life  had  long  been  a  subject  for  both  literary  and  artistic  representation  in  Ireland,  but  at  this  time—due  to  a  complex  intersection  of  ethical  and  scientific  enquiries—poets  and  artists  began  to  re-­‐examine  the  unequal  relationship  between  man  and  animal,  and  to  consider  its  implications  for  issues  of  religious  belief  and  social  justice.  The  representation  of  birdlife  would  be  a  central  preoccupation  for  these  poets,  allowing  them  to  combine  moral  and  philosophical  questions  with  attention  to  the  particularity  of  the  Irish  context.  Through  poetry,  with  its  multiplicity  of  forms  and  voices,  they  sought  to  understand  birds  from  the  perspective  of  both  thought  and  feeling,  attending  to  the  particularity  of  their  physical  appearance  and  habits,  but  also  connecting  with  their  imagined  experiences.  In  this  paper  I  will  explore  poems  that  seek  to  appeal  to  human  identification  with  the  suffering  of  birds  by  voicing  this  experience  directly  and  consider  poetry  as  a  medium  for  stimulating  understanding  of  the  non-­‐human  world.      When  Poet  Meets  Penguin:  British  Verse  Confronts  Exotic  Avifauna    Sayre  Nelson  Greenfield  (University  of  Pittsburgh)    John  Aikin’s  Essay  on  the  Application  of  Natural  History  to  Poetry  (1777)  complains  of  the  staleness  of  natural  descriptions  in  modern  poetry  and  attempts  to  promote  a  closer  attention  in  poets  “to  the  real  state  of  nature  in  their  own  country.”  Aikin  concludes,  however,  by  suggesting  that  most  productive  of  novelty  in  verse  would  be  attention  to  “the  polar  and  tropical  parts  of  the  globe,”  and  here  “What  infinite  scope  for  new  and  striking  description  would  an  animal  history  of  these  countries  afford  to  the  poet  who  should  be  able  to  draw  it  from  original  sources!”  This  paper  will  study  attempts  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  to  incorporate  exotic  birds  into  British  poetry,  particularly  those  poems  responding  to  the  ornithological  discoveries  from  the  South  Sea  voyages,  investing  new  birds  

with  significance.  Such  an  exercise  proves  difficult,  at  least  until  Coleridge’s  albatross,  precisely  because  these  birds  do  not  come  pre-­‐loaded  with  meanings  that  can  be  efficiently  evoked  within  verse.  Anna  Seward’s  Elegy  on  Captain  Cook,  which  transforms  materials  from  Cook’s  journals  into  poetry,  will  form  a  particular  focus,  though  the  paper  will  look  at  poems,  both  famous  and  obscure,  from  the  last  quarter  of  the  century.    Representing  the  Tambora  Eruption  of  1815    David  Higgins    The  April  1815  eruption  of  the  Indonesian  volcano  Mount  Tambora  is  the  largest  known  eruption  in  history.  The  explosions  were  heard  over  2,000  kilometres  away.  The  huge  amount  of  sulphur  released  into  the  atmosphere  affected  global  climate  patterns,  leading  to  a  drop  in  global  temperature  and  extreme  weather  events  in  1816.  The  immediate  death  toll  from  the  explosion,  the  tidal  wave,  and  local  famine  and  disease  is  impossible  to  know,  but  one  plausible  estimate  puts  it  at  about  117,000  people  across  Sumbawa,  Bali,  and  Lombok.  This  paper  analyses  the  collection  of  eyewitness  accounts  of  the  eruption  and  its  aftermath  that  were  collected  together  under  the  auspices  of  Sir  Stamford  Raffles,  the  British  Governor  of  Java  from  1811  to  1816.  Scholars  have  tended  to  treat  this  text  a  straightforward  source  from  which  a  narrative  of  the  eruption  and  its  effects  can  be  constructed.  However,  it  is  in  fact  a  complex  heteroglossic  production  in  which  different  perspectives  and  knowledges  intertwine  and  compete.  I  will  focus  in  particular  on  the  tension  between  the  imperialistic  and  bureaucratic  metanarrative  provided  by  Raffles  and  the  text’s  more  localised  accounts  of  the  catastrophe.  Although  Raffles  emphasises  the  sublime  power  of  the  eruption,  he  presents  the  document  as  a  form  of  environmental  knowledge  that  will  ultimately  support  imperial  power  and  control.  In  contrast,  the  individual  accounts  that  make  up  the  narrative  often  invoke  confusion,  legend,  and  ignorance.    D5  Presenter  Biographies    Lucy  Collins      Sayre  Nelson  Greenfield      David  Higgins          

Panel  Session  E:  Thursday  3rd  September:  12.45pm-­‐2.15pm    E1:  Cultivation,  Cooking  and  Consumption      Knowing  ‘People’s  Food’:  Localism,  Rose  Macaulay,  and  the  Poetry  of  the  Women’s  Land  Army  Alicia  Carroll  (Auburn  University)    Tasked  with  growing  local  food  under  duress  during  the  Great  War,  writing  members  of  the  Women’s  Land  Army  like  poet  Rose  Macaulay  leave  a  record  of  their  own  struggle  to  know  the  intersections  between  the  local  and  the  wider  world.    Officially  framed  as  ‘replacements’  of  local  farmers,  the  Landswomen  in  Macaulay’s  poems  learn  that  they  are  to  cultivate  land  long  fallow  due  not  to  the  war,  but  to  the  undercutting  of  local  farming  by  cheap  imports  under  a  hundred  years  of  laissez  faire  economics.    Schooled  in  agricultural  practices  by  a  

nation  suddenly  quite  interested  in  its  own  agriculture,  the  speakers  find  themselves  ‘placed’  in  ‘local’  communities  and  farms  where  distinct  ecologies  challenge  their  centralized  training.    The  women  come  to  know  the  difference  between  what  ‘should’  grow  according  to  their  training  methods  (such  as  spreading  manure  on  chalk  ‘like  marmalade  on  bread’),  but  ‘won’t  even  then.’  They  realize  that  in  planting,  they  sometimes  destroy  a  ‘swathe  of  People’s  Food,’  an  entity  Macaulay  sacralizes  through  initial  capitals.    Their  presence  moreover  ensures  that  local  men  can  fight  and  be  fed  while  doing  so.    Indeed,  exploring  the  paradox  between  growing  both  food  and  the  war,  Macaulay’s  Landswoman  narrators  experience  sudden  disturbing  epiphanies  into  the  practice  of  growing  local  food  itself.  Their  voices  scrutinize  the  intersection  of  the  here  and  there,  finding  both  startlingly  connected  through  food.    In  consumption-­‐based  environmentalists,  localists  often  equate  small-­‐scale  local  food  production    with  environmental  action  or  the  ethical.  But  this  same  discourse  may  disconnect  us  from  the  wider  world.    Eradicating  the  difference  between  fighting  abroad  and  planting  locally,  Macaulay’s  poems  are  a  useful  critique  of  the  limits  of  localism,  asking  us  to  think  across  and  through  the  intimacies  of  the  local  to  the  great  scale  of  the  global,  to  think  through  the  ongoing  traffic  between  here  and  there.    Gourmets'  Ecology:  The  Ethics  of  Food  Consumption  in  Ka-­‐Shiang  Liu's  Men's  Markets  and  Jewel  Tsai's  Book  of  Soil-­‐Cultivation  Roger  Pan  (Academia  Sinica,  Taiwan)    Gourmets  are  perhaps  buoyant  figures  who  share  unique  eating  experiences  but  tantalizingly  attract  our  attention  to  enjoy  the  same  dishes.  Yet,  with  the  alarming  food  crisis  caused  by  climate  changes  and  human  exploitation,  eating  inordinately  seems  to  be  unethical  to  maintain  the  environment,  where  people  need  to  live  with  other  non-­‐human  beings.        This  essay  proposes  the  ethics  of  food  consumption  by  studying  Ka-­‐Shiang  Liu’s  Men’s  Markets  and  Pearl  Tsai’s  Book  of  Soil-­‐Cultivation.  On  the  one  hand,  Liu  is  known  for  his  keen  observation  of  animals  and  their  habitats.  In  Men’s  Markets,  he  tries  to  pique  readers’  interest  to  visit  traditional  markets,  purchasing  regional  and  seasonal  food  products  to  save  energy  of  extra  conveyance.  On  the  other  hand,  Tsai  also  has  a  unique  profile  of  flora  writing  and  gastronomy.  In  Book  of  Soil-­‐Cultivation,  she  shares  her  unique  experiences  of  growing  vegetables  in  her  own  yard,  from  which  she  can  gather  materials  to  cook  daily  meals.  Both  of  them  can  be  regarded  as  gourmets  who  use  their  writing  to  inhibit  unnecessary  consumption.      To  begin,  the  essay  will  first  survey  studies  of  food  consumption  and  pinpoints  the  geographical  specificity  (Taiwan  and  Hong  Kong  indicated  in  both  books)  to  argue  the  necessity  of  temperate  consumption.  The  second  and  third  section  discusses  Liu’s  Men’s  Markets  and  Tsai’s  Book  of  Soil-­‐Cultivation  respectively.  To  conclude,  I  will  emphasize  Liu’s  and  Tsai’s  endeavor  to  harmonize  with  the  environment,  one  that  I  call  “gourmets’  ecology.”    Knowledge  about  food  in  German  Children  Cookbooks  Sabine  Planka  (University  of  Siegen)    Knowledge  about  nature  is  omnipresent  in  books  for  children.  How  nature  develops,  how  it  is  destroyed  by  men  and  how  it  can  be  saved  –  fictional  as  well  as  non-­‐fictional  books  for  children  handle  with  those  topics.  Against  this  background  the  lecture  wants  to  show  how  German  children  cookbooks  handle  with  knowledge  about  food.  In  its  young  history  –  the  beginning  of  the  German  children  cookbook  can  be  fixed  in  the  1850s  –  food  issues  can  be  found  from  the  beginning  on:  The  earliest  children  cookbooks  explain  –  besides  the  description  of  recipes  and  how  to  cook  –  how  to  keep  the  house  and  prepare  the  little  girls  

in  that  case  for  their  role  in  their  own  household  when  they  are  grown  up.  In  that  context  and  that  historical  period  of  time  it  is  –  for  example  –  important  to  know  how  to  stock  up  (perishable)  food.  In  the  development  of  German  children  cookbooks  the  handling  of  food  changes:  Food  is  merely  connected  to  a  healthy  lifestyle.  It  is  therefore  necessary  to  convey  knowledge  for  example  about  healthy  food  and  its  production,  about  how  to  live  and  eat  healthily  and  so  on.  In  the  present  this  knowledge  is  combined  with  knowledge  concerning  sustainability  (e.g.  about  environmental  protection).  The  lecture  wants  to  give  primary  a  historical  overview  of  the  development  of  German  children  cookbooks  focusing  the  explanations  given  about  (appearance  and  production  of  /  processing  /  stocking  up)  food.  Within  this  overview  the  following  aspects  will  be  analyzed:  What  is  it  that  is  conveyed  about  food  and  why  is  it  necessary  to  convey  this  knowledge?  How  is  knowledge  about  food  conveyed?  How  does  this  conveyance  change?      E1  Presenter  Biographies    Alicia  Carroll      Roger  Pan  is  currently  a  research  assistant  in  the  Institute  of  Chinese  Literature  and  Philosophy  at  Academia  Sinica  (the  highest  academic  institution  in  Taiwan,  ROC).  He  received  his  MA  from  the  Department  of  Foreign  Languages  and  Literatures  at  National  Taiwan  University.  His  primary  interests  focus  on  Cultural  Studies,  Postcolonialism,  late  19th  century  British  literature  and  Sinophone  Studies.  He  fosters  his  thinking  by  studying  anything  related  to  food.  He  had  several  conference  presentations:  “New  Jews  in  the  Shadows  of  Chinatown:  Space,  Identity,  and  Problems  of  Assimilation  in  The  Accidental  Asian  and  Mona  in  the  Promised  Land”  at  NCCU  in  2009  examines  the  interrelationship  between  Asian  American  and  Chinese  food.  “Spicy  Food,  Sullen  Mood:  Exotic  Food  and  the  Foreign  Trade  in  Vanity  Fair”  at  UW-­‐Madison  in  2010  discusses  the  curry  dish  in  the  text  and  its  political/social  implication  in  19th  century.  His  next  project  aims  at  studying  politics  in  concurrent  Taiwanese  food  literature.    Sabine  Planka  was  born  in  1980,  studied  German  Studies,  Comparative  Studies  and  Art  History  at  the  University  of  Siegen.  M.A.-­‐Thesis  in  2005  about  the  James  Bond-­‐Title  Sequences.  Ph.D.  in  2008  with  a  dissertation  about  oracles  and  divination  in  film.  Fields  of  research  and  teaching:  Literature  and  films  for  children  and  young  adults,  motifs  in  literature  and  film,  film  studies,  Stanley  Kubrick,  Tim  Burton.  Publications  and  lectures  in  the  above  named  fields  of  research.  Currently  working  on  children  cookbooks  and  artificial  humanity  in  children’s  literature.    Forthcoming  and  last  publications:  "Women's  Bodies  in  the  James  Bond  Title  Sequences",  in:  Funnell,  Lisa  (Ed.):  For  His  Eyes  Only?  The  Women  of  James  Bond:  Feminism  and  Feminity  in  the  Bond  Franchise.  New  York:  Wallflower  Press  (Columbia  University  Press)  2015  (forthcoming);  "Tim  Burtons  bunte  (Unter-­‐)Welten.  Corpse  Bride  (2005)  und  Alice  in  Wonderland  (2010)"  [Tim  Burton’s  gaudy  (under-­‐)worlds.],  in:  Klenke,  Pascal/Muth,  Laura/Seibel,  Klaudia/Simonis,  Annette  (Hgg.):  Writing  Worlds.  Welten-­‐  und  Raummodelle  der  Fantastik.  Heidelberg:  Winter  2014,  S.  191-­‐204;  Die  Zeitreise.  Ein  Motiv  in  Literatur  und  Film  für  Kinder  und  Jugendliche.  [The  motif  of  timetravelling  in  literature  and  film  for  children  and  young  adults.]  Ed.  by  Sabine  Planka.  Würzburg:  Königshausen  &  Neumann  2014;  “Ratatouille”,  in:  Kurwinkel,  Tobias/Schmerheim,  Philipp:  Kinder-­‐  und  Jugendfilmanalyse.  Konstanz/München:  UVK  2013,  pp.  232-­‐250;  „Auf  der  Suche  nach  Identität.  Eine  Betrachtung  des  Klons  in  Sangu  Mandannas  Roman  Lost  Girl  (2012)“  [The  search  for  identity:  A  View  on  Sangu  Mandanna’s  The  Lost  Girl],  in:  interjuli,  Nr.  02  (2013),  pp.  41-­‐56.    

E2:  Modernist  Prose  and  Poetry      ‘Vegetable  Humanity’  and  the  ‘Northern  Flower’  of  Vorticism:  Early  Ecology  and  the  Modernist  Avant-­‐Garde  Christina  Alt  (University  of  St  Andrews)    The  first  issue  of  the  Vorticist  magazine  BLAST  opens  with  the  assertion,  ‘We  want  to  leave  Nature  and  Men  alone…  We  do  not  want  to  change  the  appearance  of  the  world,  because  we  are  not  Naturalists,  Impressionists,  or  Futurists  (the  latest  form  of  Impressionism),  and  do  not  depend  on  the  appearance  of  the  world  for  our  art’.    Yet  Vorticism  and  other  modernist  avant-­‐garde  movements  were  more  preoccupied  with  nature  than  this  assertion  would  suggest.    Vorticism  shares  with  early  ecology  an  interest  in  the  relationship  between  environmental  conditions  and  the  forms  of  life  –  and  art  –  that  thrive  under  these  conditions.    It  also  shares  with  early  ecology  both  a  discourse  that  blends  imagery  of  the  organic  and  the  mechanical  and  a  preoccupation  with  bringing  natural  systems  under  human  control.    My  paper  will  examine  the  rhetoric  of  writers  associated  with  modernist  avant-­‐garde  movements  such  as  Vorticism  alongside  accounts  of  the  work  and  aims  of  early  ecology  in  order  to  demonstrate  the  ways  in  which  scientific  and  aesthetic  discourses  echoed  and  amplified  one  another  in  the  early  twentieth  century.    “I  Feel  Like  a  Wet  Seed  Wild  in  the  Hot  Blind  Earth”:  Fragmented  Bodies  and  Trans  corporeality  in  William  Faulkner’s  As  I  Lay  Dying  Lili  Bos  (University  of  Amsterdam)    This  paper  will  seek  out  to  bridge  the  gap  between  the  representation  of  the  human  body  and  the  representation  of  the  environment  in  William  Faulkner’s  As  I  Lay  Dying  by  putting  Faulkner’s  novel  in  light  of  Stacy  Alaimo’s  theory  of  transcorporeality.  By  doing  so,  this  paper  will  argue  that  an  as  of  yet  still  unexplored  unity  can  be  found  in  the  fragmentation  represented  in  this  work,  which  has  mostly  been  depicted  as  having  a  dividing,  individualistic  and  alienating  character.  When  looking  at  the  representation  of  the  environment  in  As  I  Lay  Dying  it  becomes  clear  that  fragmentation  can  also  be  a  unifying  force  when  looking  through  the  lens  of  Alaimo’s  theory  of  trans-­‐corporeality.  Especially  important  for  this  argument  is  the  representation  of  dust  in  Faulkner’s  novel,  which  can  be  seen  to  echo  Alaimo’s  ideas  on  trans-­‐corporeality  very  clearly.  Moreover,  when  looking  more  closely  at  Faulkner’s  poetic  use  of  language  in  the  novel,  the  idea  of  transcorporeality  can  also  be  found  echoed  through  simile  and  metaphor  throughout  the  text.  This  paper  will  contribute  to  the  ecocritical  field  because  it  will  focus  on  environmental  elements  in  Faulkner’s  novel  in  order  to  offer  a  new  and  drastically  different  approach  to  understanding  the  fragmentation  represented  in  the  work.  Consequently,  it  will  also  demonstrate  how  modern  ecocritical  theories,  such  as  transcorporeality,  can  offer  new  and  innovative  angles  from  which  to  approach  canonical  works.    Native  Ecosystems,  Flora,  and  Fauna  in  James  Joyce's  Writing  James  Fairhall  (DePaul  University)    Most  of  Joyce’s  narratives  unfold  against  the  backdrop  of  Dublin’s  manmade  structures  and  systems—what  William  Cronon  calls  “second  nature”  (Nature’s  Metropolis).  Urban  second  nature  arises  from  and  interacts  with  the  phenomena  of  biological  nature,  and  Dublin  has  always  contained  plenty  of  examples  of  this  interrelationship,  such  as  wildflowers  on  canal  walls  or  the  diverse  bird  species  of  North  Bull  Island.      

Joyce’s  fiction  is  not  much  concerned  with  flowers  or  birds  or  wild,  nonhuman  nature.    (If  he  had  wished  to  re-­‐create  the  botanical  Dublin  of  June  16,  1904,  he  could  have  used  Nathaniel  Colgan’s  timely  1904  catalog,  Flora  of  the  County  Dublin.)    Nevertheless,  the  crucial  memory  of  Bloom  and  Molly’s  youthful  love  is  their  tryst  on  the  Hill  of  Howth  among  indigenous  “wild  ferns”  (probably  native  bracken  or  lady  ferns)  and  rhododendrons  (a  long-­‐established  exotic).    In  addition,  Joyce  wrote  about  Ireland’s  bogs  and  its  vanished  oak  forest  ecosystems  in  his  critical  writings  and  in  Ulysses  and  Finnegans  Wake.    Indigenous  Irish  birds  figure  in  A  Portrait  of  the  Artist  as  a  Young  Man  as  well  as  the  Wake.    Drawing  on  Colgan  and  the  naturalist  Robert  Praeger,  this  paper  will  discuss  what  we  know  and  don’t  know  about  native  Irish  flora  and  fauna  in  Joyce’s  work.    I  have  published  recent  ecocritical  articles  on  Joyce  in  the  Joyce  Studies  Annual,  the  Irish  Studies  Review,  and  the  collection  Eco-­‐Joyce  (Cork  University  Press,  2014),  with  a  forthcoming  article  in  the  James  Joyce  Quarterly.        Modernist  Experimentation  and  Avant-­‐Garde  Poetics  as  a  Means  of  Re-­‐Enchantment  with  the  Natural  World  in  the  Poetry  of  Edith  Sitwell  Elizabeth  Harris  (Manchester  Metropolitan  University)    In  this  paper  I  will  argue  that  through  linguistic  and  formal  experimentation  modernist  poets  created  important  new  ways  of  representing  human/nature  relations  following  the  disruptive  experience  of  war  and  modernity.  Focussing  on  the  poetry  of  Edith  Sitwell,  my  paper  will  propose  that  her  avant-­‐garde  poetic  experimentation  with  the  sound,  rhythm  and  texture  of  language  created  new  and  invigorating  ways  of  representing  the  infinite  patterns  and  systems  of  the  natural  world.  In  opposition  to  readings  of  her  poetry  as  escapist  or  fantastical,  I  will  argue  that  Sitwell’s  use  of  poetic  experimentation  to  replicate  the  sensual  experience  of  early  contact  with  the  non-­‐human  world  encouraged  a  re-­‐enchantment  with  nature  as  a  means  of  challenging  the  dissociative  pressures  of  modernity.  Focusing  primarily  on  the  poetry  of  the  1920s,  my  paper  aims  to  show  that  experimentation  in  Sitwell’s  work,  as  well  as  in  modernist  poetry  generally,  does  not  mark  a  rejection  of  nature  writing,  but  an  attempt  to  increase  knowledge  of  the  complexity  and  vitality  of  the  natural  world  through  the  reinvigoration  of  form  and  language.  Sitwell’s  work  then  becomes  an  example  of  how  poetry  can  be  a  means  of  achieving  a  greater  understanding  of  the  diversity  and  vitality  of  the  natural  world.  It  also  poses  the  possibility  that  this  re-­‐enchantment  with  place  can  be  translated  into  a  deepened  environmental  consciousness  and  a  strengthened  commitment  to  environmental  protection.      E2  Presenter  Biographies    Christina  Alt      Lili  Bos      James  Fairhall      Elizabeth  Harris      E3:  Green  on  Stage  and  Screen      Staging  Environmental  Irony:  foregrounding  background  in  early  modern  theatre  Gwilym  Jones   (University  of  Westminster)    

‘‘Tis  bitter  cold’,  we  are  told  at  the  start  of  Hamlet.  ‘The  day  is  hot’  we  learn,  in  Romeo  and  Juliet’s  Verona.  We  are  to  imagine  Lear  in  a  storm,  and  Touchstone  sunbathing.  We  look  up  to  the  clouds  in  Hamlet,  to  the  stars  in  Merchant  of  Venice.  The  audience  of  early  modern  theatre,  in  the  open-­‐air  playhouses  around  London,  are  exhorted  to  imagine  the  environment,  just  as  they  are  told  to  ‘think  when  we  talk  of  horses  that  you  see  them’.    But  what  happens  if  Hamlet  is  staged  in  a  heatwave?  Or  Romeo  and  Juliet  in  a  winter  frost?  In  my  book,  Shakespeare’s  Storms,  I  use  the  phrase  ‘environmental  irony’  to  think  about  the  dual-­‐level  environmental  experience  of  the  playhouse.  Like  the  open-­‐air  setting  for  which  John  Cage  wrote  his  silence,  the  audience  is  directed  to  attend  to  the  environment  and  experience  its  presence,  and  its  present-­‐ness.  The  ironic  experience  of  the  environment  in  early  modern  theatre  occurs  whether  the  stage  weather  is  closely  aligned  with,  or  thoroughly  opposed  to,  the  audience’s  weather.  Background  is  foregrounded:  the  audience  is  prompted  to  recognise  the  environment  as  mediated  through  language  and  gesture.  This  paper  will  explore  the  ways  in  which  Shakespeare  and  his  contemporaries  utilise  this  quality  of  early  modern  performance  aesthetic.  What  does  it  tell  us  about  our  environmental  discourse?  What  happens  when  characters  contradict  each  other’s  representation  of  the  environment?  And  what  are  the  implications  for  ecocritical  thinking?    Political  Ecology:  Ecological  Ideology  and  Apocalyptic  Scenarios  on  Stage  Zümre  Gizem  Yilmaz  (Hacettepe  University)    Throughout  history,  there  has  been  a  tendency  to  locate  the  source  of  “irrational  fear”  felt  for  the  natural  environments,  especially  after  natural  catastrophies  have  destroyed  human  habitats.  Although  human  beings  have  always  found  ways  to  “control”  the  natural  world,  with  claims  of  superiority  over  other  beings,  their  attempts  to  control  have  been  countered  by  the  agency  of  nature  and  other  beings.  Denying  the  agential  capacity  of  nonhuman  beings,  humans  have  relied  on  their  discursive  practices  to  solve  the  environmental  problems  they  have  encountered.  Instead  of  disclosing  the  environmental  findings  and  evidences,  “authorities”  with  direct  access  to  knowledge-­‐producing  bodies  have,  rather,  chosen  to  ignore  them  so  as  not  to  lose  their  political  and  economic  power.  Nonetheless,  when  nature  strikes  back,  they  themselves  canalise  all  their  wealth  to  change  the  situation  for  their  own  sake  within  an  anthropocentric  perspective.  This  situation  is  deeply  illustrated  in  most  of  contemporary  plays,  two  of  which  are  The  Contingency  Plan  (2009)  by  Steve  Waters  and  Earthquakes  in  London  (2010)  by  Mike  Bartlett.  These  plays  play  a  significant  role  in  raising  an  ecological  consciousness  by  erasing  the  anthropocentric  point  of  view,  and  by  acknowledging  the  intrinsic  value  of  all  the  beings  and  nature  itself.  The  apocalyptic  scenarios,  in  these  two  plays,  challenge  the  audience  into  realising  the  dethronement  of  the  “human”  from  its  privileged  place  among  other  beings  while  representing  a  self-­‐developing  nature  without  human  intervention.    Gezai  theatre,  Shakespeare  theatre,  and  the  global  warnings  Iris  Ralph  (Tamkang  University)      This  paper  ecocritically  situates  Shakespeare  in  local  as  well  as  presentist  East  Asian  contexts.  Drawing  on  a  “presentist”  argument  by  Sharon  O’Dair  and  a  “localist”  argument  by  Bi-­‐qi  Beatrice  Lei  and  Ching-­‐Hsi  Perng,  the  author  ecocritically  analyses  three  films:  Flying  Dragon,  Dancing  Phoenix  (龍飛鳳舞)  (2012),  directed  by  Yu-­‐lin  Wang  (王育麟);  Shakespeare  in  Love  (1998),  directed  by  John  Madden;  and  Romeo  and  Juliet  (1996),  directed  by  Baz  Luhrmann.  Flying  Dragon,  Dancing  Phoenix,  analogous  to  the  main  events  of  Shakespeare  in  Love,  follows  a  gezai  theater  troupe’s  efforts  to  remain  financially  solvent.  In  addition,  the  film  depicts  the  Tien  Lung  theater  troupe’s  struggle  with  adverse  weather  conditions  that  

associate  with  global  warming  and  air  pollution  from  local  industries.  In  elaborating  on  this  content,  Ralph  comments  on  the  opening  scene  in  the  film  of  a  typhoon  that  closes  down  a  gezai  performance  and  on  later  scenes  of  the  industrial  city  of  Kaohsiung,  the  largest  industrial  city  in  Taiwan  where  much  of  the  action  of  the  film  takes  place.  Small  scale,  community  organized,  local  gezai  theater  is  commonly  performed  out  of  doors  in  Kaohsiung  and  in  other  heavily  industrialized  cities  in  Taiwan,  but  as  unruly  weather  has  become  more  intense  and  frequent  and  as  air  pollution  has  increased,  gezai  theater  has  lost  audiences  or  moved  indoors,  catering  to  middleclass  audiences  who  are  reluctant  to  patronize  the  smaller,  older,  and  traditional  outdoor  venues.  Ralph  ties  these  concerns  as  they  are  represented  in  Flying  Dragon,  Dancing  Phoenix  to  Shakespeare  in  Love,  which  follows  the  staging  of  Shakespeare’s  play  Romeo  and  Juliet  in  London  at  the  turn  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  to  Luhrmann’s  Romeo  and  Juliet,  staged  against  the  backdrop  of  the  car  and  carbon  culture  of  modern  urban  Los  Angeles.    Presenter  Biographies    Gwilym  Jones      Zümre  Gizem  Yilmaz  obtained  her  bachelor’s  degree  in  2010,  and  her  master’s  degree  in  2012  at  Hacettepe  University,  in  the  Department  of  English  Language  and  Literature.  She  is  currently  studying  on  her  PhD  dissertation,  analysing  the  harmonious  and  discordant  intermeshments  of  the  cosmic  elements  in  Renaissance  English  drama  in  the  light  of  the  theory  of  ecophobia.  Her  recent  publications  include  an  article  “New  Materialisms  on  Stage:  Environmental  Directions  in  Contemporary  British  Drama”  and  a  book  chapter  entitled  “Who  is  Afraid  of  the  ‘Dark’?  Familiarising  the  Unknown.”      Iris  Ralph  is  an  Assistant  Professor  in  the  English  Department  at  Tamkang  University  in  Taiwan.  Dr  Ralph  previously  taught  at  the  University  of  Texas  at  Austin  (USA),  Northern  Melbourne  Institute  of  TAFE  (Australia),  and  Victoria  University  (Australia).  Her  areas  of  specialty  are  animal  studies  and  ecocriticism.  Her  journal  articles  have  been  published  in  CLCWeb:  Comparative  Literature  and  Culture  (Purdue  University,  Indiana,  USA),  Journal  of  Ecocriticism  (University  of  Northern  British  Columbia,  Canada),  Journal  of  Poyang  Lake  (Jiangxi  Academy  of  Social  Sciences,  Jiangxi,  China),  NTU  Studies  in  Language  and  Literature  (National  Taiwan  University),  and  Concentric  (National  Taiwan  Normal  University).  Dr  Ralph’s  most  recent  publication  is  a  book  chapter  in  a  critical  collection  of  essays  on  Ted  Hughes  (Ted  Hughes)  edited  by  Terry  Gifford  (Palgrave  Macmillan  2015).    E4:  Cultural  Economies  of  Waste    Spectacular  Trash:  Contemporary  Remediations  of  Global  Urban  Waste  Sarah  Harrison  (University  of  Wisconsin)    As  cities  around  the  world  grow  at  a  seemingly  unprecedented  rate,  so  too  do  the  varied  forms  of  waste  that  global  urbanization  produces—not  only  unwanted  objects,  but  also  environmental  toxins,  defunct  buildings  and,  crucially,  the  numbers  of  impoverished  urban  inhabitants  who  are  reduced  to  the  same  status  as  the  detritus  with  which  they  live  and  work.  If,  in  Mary  Douglas’  well-­‐known  formulation,  dirt  is  “matter  out  of  place”,  the  response  of  many  urban  stakeholders  has  been  to  put  waste  out  of  sight  and  out  of  mind  where  possible.  Although  material  ubiquity  increasingly  renders  this  logic  untenable,  political  invisibility  still  serves  to  perpetuate  the  marginalization  of  many  cities’  poorest  residents.  

This  paper  examines  two  artistic  projects  that  disrupt  the  willful  ignorance  of  urban  waste  through  their  innovative  “remediations”  of  discarded  things,  degraded  spaces  and  devalued  people.  Both  a  corrective  and  creative  process,  the  conversion  of  urban  waste  into  visual  and  performance  art  productively  defamiliarizes  the  uneven  modes  of  waste  production,  disposal  and  management  that  underpin  today’s  problematic  urban  ecosystems.  I  assess  both  the  utopian  promise  and  potential  limitations  of  the  projects  documented  in  the  recent  films  Waste  Land  (2010)—an  account  of  modern  artist  Vik  Muniz’  transformation  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  trash  pickers  and  refuse  into  mixed-­‐media  portraits—and  Trash  Dance  (2013)——  the  story  of  American  choreographer  Allison  Orr’s  staging  of  a  dance  performance  using  the  garbage  workers  and  trucks  of  Austin,  Texas.  Of  particular  interest  is  how  these  displays  of  waste  not  only  command  a  local  audience  for  that  which  is  deliberately  “unseen”,  but  also  the  ways  in  which  their  visual  afterlives  describe  and  enact  the  globalized  circulation  of  urban  waste.  In  keeping  with  the  conference  theme  of  “green  knowledge”,  these  works  demand  a  better  understanding  of  the  unequal  urban  ecosystems  in  which  waste  circulates  as  material  resource,  unwanted  by-­‐product  and  desirable  artifact.    Glean  Thinking:  Gleaning,  Lean  and  the  Gleanologic  of  Latest  Capitalism  Natalie   Joelle  (Birkbeck  College,  University  of  London)    This  paper  complicates  redemptive  concepts  of  gleaning  in  recent  ecocritical  and  new  materialist  scholarship  (Boscagli,  2014;  Sandilands,  2011)  in  light  of  divergent  current  representations  of  gleaning  practices.    Beginning  with  Jamie  Oliver’s  feminised  ‘kinky’  gleaning,  at  once  countercultural  and  too  easily  appropriable  (Fresh  One  Productions,  2015),  the  paper  demonstrates  how  the  term  has  recently  gained  currency  in  popular  culture  as  part  of  Tayloristic  and  largely  depoliticised  debates  on  food  waste  reform,  and  suggests  that  these  draw  upon  dominant  ‘lean’  management  ideologies,  which  aspire  to  eliminate  all  waste  or  ‘muda’.    The  paper  presents  a  polemical  genealogy  of  ‘lean  thinking’  (Womack  &  Jones,  2003)  in  lean  meat  and  its  slaughterhouse  technologies,  and  puts  management  theory  into  conversation  with  The  Book  of  Ruth  to  consider  gleaning  as  a  mode  of  resistance  to  ‘lean  thinking’.    Finally,  this  paper  proposes  that  today  there  is  a  pharmacology  of  gleaning,  or,  gleanologic,  which  typifies  our  ecological  moment  of  capitalism:  poised,  as  poison,  between  the  increasing  pervasiveness  of  ‘lean  thinking’  in  managerial  strategy  (Leadbeater,  2015),  and  a  more  curative  challenge  to  carnism  (Joy,  2011)  that  is  radical  insofar  as  carnism  and  capitalism  are  coarticulated  (Shukin,  2009).    In  contrast  to  Boscagli’s  optimistic  conclusion,  it  suggests  that  gleaning  as  a  method  of  gathering  ‘green  knowledge’  is  pharmacologically  troubling  in  lean  times.    Salvage  Ecology:  Annie  Ross's  Forest  One  Deena  Rymhs   (University  of  British  Colombia)    Annie  Ross’  art  installation  Forest  One  re-­‐casts  normative  notions  of  value  by  transforming  the  discards  of  consumer  culture  into  a  singular  work  of  art.  A  1956  Nash  Metropolitan  car  woven  in  cedar  and  plastic,  Forest  One  is  a  commentary  on  automotive  cultures,  waste,  and  the  environments  they  create.  (Ross  salvaged  the  bark  from  an  urban  forest  cut  down  for  condo  developments  near  Vancouver;  she  found  the  Metropolitan  car  abandoned  on  an  Oregon  farm.)  Forest  One  remediates  the  violence  of  waste  in  its  use  of  solely  reclaimed  material:  cedar  bark,  plastic  box  strapping,  thrift-­‐shop  castaways,  and  other  landfill-­‐destined  materials  re-­‐cover  the  car  along  with  woven  insignia  of  plant  and  animal  “spirits.”  Ross’  reappraisal  of  discarded  objects  can  be  appreciated  through  recent  examinations  of  ex-­‐commodities  and  cultural  economies  of  waste  offered  by  Arjun  Appadurai  and  Steven  J.  

Jackson.  My  reading  of  Ross’  work  draws  on  Appadurai’s  and  Jackson’s  work  next  to  Jane  Bennett’s  contributions  to  new  materialism  to  explore  the  relationship  between  environmental  and  social  violence  and  the  connections  between  human  and  non-­‐human  life  in  Ross’  work.  Blurring  categories  of  animate/inanimate,  organic/inorganic,  subject/object,  nature/culture,  Ross’  art  and  writing  propose  a  radically  expansive  ecology  that  illuminates  human  and  non-­‐human  interdependencies  and  urges  her  audiences  to  see  themselves  in  horizontal  rather  than  vertical  relationship  to  their  environments.  My  discussion  of  Forest  One  will  trace  the  affective  and  ethical  connections  among  people,  things,  and  their  environments  made  manifest  in  this  installation  and  the  broader  ontological  implications  of  the  ecology  suggested  in  Ross’  work.    E5  Presenter  Biographies    Sarah  Harrison  recently  completed  her  PhD  in  English  at  the  University  of  Wisconsin-­‐Madison  where  her  interdisciplinary  research  focused  on  postcolonial  studies,  transnational  literature,  ecocriticism  and  urban  studies.  She  is  currently  completing  my  first  monograph,  Waste  Matters:  Urban  Margins  in  Contemporary  Postcolonial  Literature,  which  examines  how  Anglophone  and  Francophone  writers  from  the  Caribbean,  India,  the  US  and  Africa  respond  to  the  challenges  of  contemporary  urbanization  through  their  formal  and  thematic  engagement  with  urban  waste.  Her  other  research  interests  include:  contemporary  reworkings  of  the  “nature  as  healer”  genre  and  the  role  of  infrastructure  as  theme  and  form  in  global  literature.    Natalie  Joelle      Deena  Ryhms      E6:  Urban  Spaces  and  City  Stories      Place,  Landscape  and    Memory  in  Gao  Xingjian’s  Soul  Mountain  and  Kiran  Desai’s  The  Inheritance  of  Loss  Anurag  Bhattacharyya   (Dibrugarh  University)    Soul  Mountain  (2000)  is  an  autobiographical  novel  which  offers  a  wonderful  synthesis  of  place  and  landscape  through  the  mythic  geographic  and  the  biocentric  world.  Gao's  strange  excursions  allows  him  to  ponder  on  the  way  the  Cultural  Revolution  has  swept  away  the  vital  interrelationship  between  the  human  and  physical  ecology  as  decisively  as  it  has  destroyed  the  ancient  forests.  Kiran  Desai’s  2006  Man  Booker  Prize  novel  The  Inheritance  of  Loss  (2006)  is  a  story  set  in  the  mid-­‐1980s  in  Kalimpong  a  Himalayan  town  by  the  foot  of  Mount  Kangchenjunga,  and  in  New  York  City.    Kiran  Desai  integrated  her  study  of  nature  and  the  environment  into  fiction  and  embodied  her  ecological  observations  in  her  characters  and  settings.  The  paper  intends  to  examine  two  texts  from  different  geographical  zones  by  two  expatriate  writers  which  have  been  successful  in  creating  a  mark  in  world  literature  have  been  selected.  Chinese  Nobel  laureate  Gao  Xingjian’s  Soul  Mountain  (2000),  is  a  predominantly  introspective  journey  in  the  early  80s  into  the  remote  mountains  and  ancient  forests  of  Sichuan  in  southwest  China.    The  paper  seeks  to  bring  out  a  better  understanding  of  the  intertwining  aspects  of  place,  landscape,  memory  and  geography  in  ethnographic  representation  and  its  significance  in  both  novels.  In  the  twentieth  century,  China  had  experienced  a  period  of  amnesia,  in  which  the  nation’s  rich  past  was  erased  from  the  collective  memory  of  the  Chinese.  The  paper  examines  how  ethnological  propensity,  as  shown  in  Soul  Mountain  and  The  Inheritance  of  

Loss  proves  transgressive  in  several  ways:  defending  buried  minority  cultures,  which  are  the  casualties  of  the  ravages  of  dominant  culture,  protecting  individual  memory  from  established  historiography,  and  finally,  examining  the  dark  areas  of  one’s  personal  past  in  order  to  become  reconciled  with  oneself.  The  journey  in  both  the  novels  traverse  through  the  landscape  which  creates  a  dreamlike,  meditative  series  of  interrelated  fragments,  images  that  includes  place  as  preserver  of  cultural  memory,  suppressed  folk  cultures,  the  recovery  of  childhood  and  spirituality,  symbolized  by  the  elusive  Soul  Mountain.      From  Green  to  Brown  Knowledge  Landscapes:  Re-­‐rooting  Urban  Environmental  Discourse  from  Metaphor  to  Matter    Christopher  Schliephake  (University  of  Augsburg)    Early  analysts  of  urban  life  in  America  like  the  Chicago  School  of  Urban  Sociology  followed  a  decidedly  metaphorical  way  of  analyzing  the  complex  interrelations  between  social  groups,  their  institutions,  and  the  larger  urban  environments  in  which  they  were  located.  In  their  concept,  the  urban  constituted  an  “ecosystem”,  governed  by  many  of  the  same  processes  that  could  be  found  in  nature.  However,  their  aim  was  not  so  much  to  study  ecological  relationships  but  to  understand  urban  systems,  building  on  ecological  analogies.  Thereby,  the  Chicago  School  became  a  driving  force  behind  the  evolution  of  “human  ecology”  and,  along  with  it,  of  the  idea  of  collective  adaption  to  environments  as  well  as  of  the  view  of  cities  as  contested  habitats.  In  the  last  decades,  however,  the  tide  has  changed.  What  had  once  functioned  as  a  metaphorical  way  that  helped  in  the  production  of  knowledge,  is  now  taken  quite  literally:  Government  think  tanks  as  well  as  non-­‐profit  organizations  like  Terreform  ONE  embrace  the  idea  of  human-­‐built  environments  as  ecosystems,  shifting  the  focus  from  the  social  interactions  of  urban  life  to  their  material  fabrics.  With  big-­‐budget  undertakings  like  the  construction  of  “eco-­‐cities”,  the  raw  matter  of  cities  comes  to  the  fore:  Waste,  sewage,  greenhouse-­‐gas  emissions,  building  materials  etc.  “Urban  ecology”  has  thus  taken  a  new  turn  and  has  become  a  mode  of  knowledge  production  concerned  with  the  material  world  and  the  question  of  how  human  habitats  of  the  future  have  to  be  transformed  in  order  to  make  them  more  sustainable.  Against  this  background,  I  want  to  give  a  short  overview  of  these  theoretical  developments  and  to  bring  recent  urban  ecological  debates  together  with  a  new  trend  in  the  burgeoning  field  of  ecocriticism,  namely  “material  ecocriticism”.  While  I  argue  that  “ecocriticism”  can  itself  be  seen  as  a  specific  mode  of  knowledge  production  that  seeks  to  highlight  interconnectedness  and  feedback  relations  between  the  human  and  the  non-­‐human  world,  I  also  want  to  show  how  the  vibrant  sub-­‐strand  of  “material  ecocriticism”  challenges  traditional  dichotomies  between  “nature”  and  “culture”,  “city”  and  “country”.  With  this  theoretical  model  in  mind,  I  will  analyze  the  intersections  between  recent  urban  and  environmental  discourse  and  try  to  dissect  the  ways  in  which  environmental  knowledge  production  has  become  implicated  in  the  planning  of  future  worlds,  where  matter  comes  to  matter  –  but  where  there  is  also  the  question  of  who  will  profit  from  this  and  who  will  be  left  behind.    In  self-­‐renewing  chorus':  Pynchon's  thermodynamic  Londons  George  Francis  Bickers  (University  of  York)    My  paper  is  an  examination  of  Thomas  Pynchon's  depiction  of  late-­‐  and  post-­‐war  London  in  Gravity's  Rainbow  (1971),  in  particular  the  first  section,  'Beyond  the  Zero'.  Adopting  the  critical  focus  on  entropy  as  it  has  been  applied  to  Pynchon's  depiction  of  the  rocket  in  the  novel,  my  paper  instead  refocuses  this  entropic  exploration  onto  the  figuration  of  London.  

Pushing  against  Richard  Lehan's  suggestion  that  'the  city  is  a  closed  system:  nothing  provides  it  energy  outside  itself'  (1998),  I  make  the  claim  that  the  city's  exploitation  of  resources  of  energy  did  not  cease  once  it  had  exploited  the  resources  of  its  rural  surroundings,  but  instead  feeds  on  its  people  and,  in  the  context  of  the  novel,  'the  War'.    The  paper  examines  a  different  perspective  on  energy  consumption  and  utilisation.  Outside  of  its  immediate  wartime  context,  Pynchon's  London  is  endowed  with  a  form  of  consciousness,  unspeaking,  but  active  and  hungry.  This  'City-­‐Paranoiac',  as  labelled  in  the  novel,  is  formed  not  only  by  its  physicality  but  also  by  a  idea  of  'London'.  Once  London  proper  has  exhausted  its  rural  surroundings,  the  survival  of  the  city  relies  on  London  proper  becoming  the  sacrificial  energy  source  for  a  vision  of  the  city,  a  potential  city,  'London'.  In  doing  so,  the  perception  of  our  relationship  with  energy  changes,  as  the  city  (and  not  its  people)  becomes  autophagic,  the  thing  to  be  fed  and  maintained  by  the  people  and  the  infrastructure  of  those  who  constitute  it,  simultaneously  self-­‐sustaining  and  depletive.    E6  Presenter  Biographies    Anurag  Bhattacharyya  teaches  English  Literature  in  the  Department  of  English,  Dibrugarh  University,  Assam  (India).  In  2013  he  obtained  his  Ph.D.  Degree  from  Indian  Institute  of  Technology  Guwahati  (IITG)  in  the  area  of  Ecocriticism.    The  thesis  was  titled  “Places,  Landscapes  and  Lives:  Towards  an  Ecocritical  Reading  of  Selected  Fiction  of  Gao  Xingjian”.  His  other  research  interest  includes  Environmental  Literature,  Place  Studies,  Indian  Writing  in  English  and  Cultural  and  Postcolonial  Studies.  He  has  been  constantly  involved  with  the  development  in  the  field  of  ecocriticism  and  regularly  publishes  his  research  articles  in  International/National  Journals.  He  attended  many  National  and  International  Conferences  in  India  as  well  as  abroad  as  a  participant.In  October  2011  he  was  invited  and  offered  a  fellowship  to  deliver  his  lecture  on  Gao  Xingjian,  Chinese  Nobel  Laureate  in  Literature.      Christopher  Schliephake      George  Francis  Bickers          

Panel  Session  F:  Friday  4th  September  9.00am-­‐10.30am  

 F1:  Salvage  and  Survival      PostNatural  Futures:  Biocultural  Onto-­‐Epistemology  in  Geoff  Ryman’s  The  Child  Garden  Kerim  Can  Yazgünoglu  (Hacettepe  University)    It  is  due  to  the  fundamental  inextricability  of  culture  and  biology  or  culture  and  nature  or  bios  and  zoe  that  “biocultures”  in  the  posthumanist  thought  question  the  politics  of  life  itself,  human  and  nonhuman  life-­‐forms,  material  and  immaterial  entities  in  line  with  the  new  understandings  of  new  materialisms.  In  this  regard,  what  emerges  from  today’s  debate  pertaining  to  various  strands  of  posthumanism  is  that  every  material  beings,  human  and  nonhuman,  has  “vitality”  in  the  sense  that  “things”  has  agency  or  capacity  to  affect  and  to  be  affected,  depending  on  their  “intra-­‐actions”  with  other  material-­‐discursive  practices.  It  is  in  relation  to  biocultural  onto-­‐epistemology  that  an  internet  site  raises  a  question:  “How  to  understand  identity,  personhood,  individuality,  community,  and  the  political  in  the  context  of  biochemical,  neurobiological,  genomic,  technological  information?”  In  this  sense,  drawing  principally  on  theories  of  posthumanism,  my  aim  is  to  explore  not  only  ontology  of  material  bodies  with  regard  to  new  vitalism,  but  also  epistemological  implications  of  biocultures  in  Geoff  Ryman’s  The  Child  Garden  (1989).  With  the  impact  of  biotechnologies,  genetic  engineering,  and  biomedicine,  for  instance,  viruses  in  the  novel  become  biocultural  actants  transferring  “knowledge”  to  people  whose  bodies  are  biologically  readable.  Suggesting  that  all  material  bodies  as  readable  texts  are  counted  as  “vital  entities”  such  as  viruses,  bacteria,  several  microorganisms,  intra-­‐acting  within  the  phenomena,  this  biocultural  thought  might  bring  politics  of  epistemology  into  question    ‘The  Only  Truly  Alien  Planet  is  Earth’—measuring  ontology  in  J.G.  Ballard’s  The  Drowned  World  Miriah  Reynolds  (Durham  University)    This  paper  aims  to  ferment  a  theory  of  ontological  becoming  in  one  of  J.G.  Ballard’s  ‘disaster  quartet’  novels,  The  Drowned  World  (1962).    Ballard’s  biospheric  disaster  tale  provides  a  rich  site  for  the  aestheticized  thresholds  that  evade  definitive  critical  models  or  theories.    For  Ballard,  ‘inner  space’  of  the  human  mind  becomes  the  new  frontier  in  an  outer  world  saturated  with  mass  media  fiction.    However,  the  fiction  is  a  catastrophic  ecological  real:  a  massive  global  warming  event  upends  human  understanding  through  a  new  brutalised  perception.    Evolution  produces  atavistic  megafauna  reminiscent  of  the  late  Triassic  Period.    Human  birth  rates  decline  and  nightmarish  psychic  disturbances  suggest  movement  towards  an  origin  and  originary  point  in  anthropocentric  history.  I  aim  to  explore  concepts  of  world-­‐making  as  a  relationship  in  seating  subjectivity  and  being  critical  to  the  functional  Ballardian  aesthetic.    To  do  this,  I  put  Ballard  in  dialogue  with  the  Heideggerian  event  of  Ereignis  or  how  ‘appropriation  appropriates’  in  thinking  the  ground  of  being.      I  argue  that  we  can  read  Ballard’s  world  catastrophe  novels  richly  by  using  Heidegger  to  mark  the  space  after  catastrophe  as  a  kind  of  excessive  spatiality  beyond  the  horizon  of  the  event.    In  Ballard’s  humans,  this  is  met  with  Heideggerian  Vorgang:  the  desperate  attempt  for  scientist-­‐figures  in  The  Drowned  World  to  objectify  the  genesis  of  the  disaster  through  obsessiveness.    I  also  will  touch  upon  these  thematic  human  desires  through  Derrida’s  notion  of  the  re-­‐mark  to  analyse  how  the  notion  of  alterity,  which  evades  representation,  might  illuminate  the  opacity  of  knowing  in  Ballard’s  prose.      

The  wilderness  as  a  pivotal  topos  in  David  Almond  and  Dave  McKean’s  The  Savage  (2008)  Hege  Emma  Rimmereide  (Bergen  University  College)    The  scope  of  this  paper  is  to  discuss  how  the  concept  of  wilderness  is  represented  in  David  Almond  and  Dave  McKean’s  The  Savage  (2009).  The  paper  will  discuss  the  dialectic  relationship  between  nature  and  culture  expressed  in  the  dialogue  between  the  image  and  the  verbal  text  and  between  a  cultivated  and  uncultivated  verbal  language.    The  paper  will  be  a  reading  of  The  Savage  and  discuss  three  perspectives  on  the  notion  of  wilderness:  from  the  point  of  view  of  ecocriticism;  Almond’s  own  view  on  wilderness;  and  finally,  discuss  the  nature/culture  boundary  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  ancient  figure  of  Virgil’s  wheel.  These  perspectives  will  challenge  the  notion  of  nature  and  culture  and  discuss  how  the  verbal  and  visual  representations  of  nature  found  in  children’s  literature  shape  children’s  local  and  global  environmental  awareness  when  expressed  in  written  and  oral  texts.  The  research  is  part  of  a  research  project  on  Nature  in  Children’s  Literature  (NaChiLit).20  The  main  objective  of  the  NaChiLit  research  project  is  to  challenge  the  various  ways  in  which  nature  is  understood  within  the  field  of  children’s  literature.        F1  Presenter  Biographies    Kerim  Can  Yazgünoğlu  is  currently  Research  Assistant  and  Ph.D.  candidate  in  the  Department  of  English  Language  and  Literature  at  Hacettepe  University-­‐Ankara,  Turkey.  He  obtained  his  Master’s  Degree  in  English  Literature  from  Hacettepe  University,  Turkey  in  2012,  with  his  Master’s  thesis,  titled  “Corporeal  and  Trans-­‐Corporeal  Reflections  in  Angela  Carter’s  The  Passion  of  New  Eve  and  Jeanette  Winterson’s  The  Stone  Gods.”  His  areas  of  interest  include  21st  Century  British  Novel,  the  Body  in  English  Literature  and  Culture,  Feminist  and  Queer  Fiction,  Ecocriticism,  Posthumanism,  Environmental  Pollution  in  British  Novel.  He  is  conducting  research  on  “postnatures”  and  waste  studies  in  21st  –century  British  novel  for  his  Ph.D.  dissertation.      Miriah  Reynolds      Hege  Emma  Rimmereide  is  a  Lecturer  at  Bergen  University  College.  Her  most  recent  publications  are  “Graphic  Novels  in  EFL  learning”  (2013)  and  “Using  picturebooks  and  illustrated  books  in  autonomous  learning  to  improve  L2  writing  among  11-­‐year  olds”  (2013)  published  in  The  Language  Learning  Journal.  She  teaches  literature  in  teacher  education.    F2:  The  Alchemical  Landscape    A  panel  and  discussion  session  covering  the  work  of  the  recently  launched  research  project:  The  Alchemical  Landscape.  For  more  information  on  the  project  and  to  join  the  mailing  list,  please  consult  the  project  website:  http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk      Yvonne  Salmon  (University  of  Cambridge,  Project  Director)    The  Alchemical  Landscape      

20 The research is part of a research project on Nature in Nature in Children’s literature at Bergen University College, Norway.

An  increasing  number  of  writers,  artists,  musicians  and  film-­‐makers  are  re-­‐investing  the  landscape  with  esoteric  and  mythic  imagery.  From  the  revival  of  ‘Folk  Horror’  to  the  cross-­‐over  between  magical  and  artistic  practice,  this  ‘enchanted’  representation  of  the  rural  works  as  both  a  link  to  the  past  and  an  articulation  of  pressing  contemporary  concerns.      This  paper  will  briefly  map  the  creative,  aesthetic  and  political  implications  of  this  ‘geographic  turn’.      Phil  Legard,  (Leeds  Beckett  University)      The  Bright  Sound  Behind  the  Sound:  Real-­‐World  Music,  Symbolic  Discourse  and  the  Foregrounding  of  Imagination  This  paper  responds  to  a  recent  article  by  American  sound  artist  Kim  Cascone  in  which  he  asserts  that  the  recent  trend  for  the  presentation  of  environmental  recordings  as  ‘sonic  art’  is  crucially  lacking  in  some  form  of  ‘soul’  or  vitality.  Cascone  suggests  that  it  is  the  responsibility  of  an  artist  working  with  real-­‐world  sounds  to  enter  a  more  imaginative  engagement  that  precedents  within  the  field  (and  within  the  wider  field  of  sonic  arts  in  general)  have  historically  presented.  The  paper  briefly  explores  historical  impulse  to  deprecate  the  importance  of  imagination,  along  with  the  imaginative  implications  of  discourse  around  what  Norman  calls  ‘real-­‐world  music’.  From  here,  we  explore  the  relationship  between  imagination  and  sound  in  two  pieces  of  sonic  art  and  argue  that  one  response  to  Cascone’s  call  for  an  imaginative  turn  can  be  found  within  the  idea  of  the  symbol  as  codified  in  Romantic  and  ‘traditional’  poetic  discourse  (after  Kathleen  Raine).  The  paper  explores  the  way  in  which  a  cultivation  of  an  ‘imaginative  perception’  can  be  used  to  define,  reveal  or  elucidate  such  symbols  in  a  compositional  context  and  relates  the  creative  and  interpretive  use  of  ‘sound-­‐symbols’  to  both  Voss’  methodology  of  the  imagination  (2009)  and  Thomas’  multidimensional  spectrum  of  imagination  (2014).    Presenter  Biographies    Yvonne  Salmon      Phil  Legard        F3:  Projects  narrative,  poetic  and  sculptural      Ways  of  Knowing  Watersheds:  Loren  Eiseley's  "Flow  of  the  River"  and  the  Platte  Basin  Timelapse  Project  Tom  Lynch  (University  of  Nebraska)    Theoretical  conversations  regarding  place/space  studies  often  revolve  around  the  competing  claims  of  lococentrism  vs.  a  global  perspective.  In  this  paper  I  contend  that  this  formulation  is  a  false  and  unproductive  dichotomy  that  should  be  resisted  at  every  opportunity,  and  I  offer  the  bioregional  concept  of  watershed  consciousness  as  a  particularly  apt  and  rigorously  materialist  venue  in  which  to  demonstrate  a  more  wholistic  perspective.    Places  and  their  distinctive  features  exist  at  a  complexly  graduated  range  of  scales,  revealing  nested  and  interconnected  characteristics  from  the  smallest  to  the  largest  level.  Few  planetary  landforms  illustrate  this  more  than  watersheds  and  the  larger  hydrological  cycle  of  which  they  are  a  part.  Being  fractals,  watersheds  can  be  envisioned  at  a  nearly  infinite  range  of  telescoping  and  mutually  constitutive  scales.  The  movement  of  a  water  molecule  through  bodies,  watersheds,  and  planets  gives  the  lie  to  the  local  vs.  global  polarity.    

Yet  knowing  these  facts  in  an  imaginatively  meaningful  way  can  be  challenging.  Of  the  many  traditions  of  environmental  thought,  bioregionalists  have  been  at  the  forefront  of  attempting  to  generate  what  Gary  Snyder  first  referred  to  as  a  "watershed  consciousness."  This  paper  examines  two  efforts  to  develop  such  a  consciousness  within  the  watershed  of  the  Platte  River  in  the  interior  of  the  North  American  continent.  The  first  is  Loren  Eiseley's  essay  "The  Flow  of  the  River,"  published  as  the  second  chapter  of  The  Immense  Journey  in  1957.  In  this  essay  Eiseley  combines  personal  experience  narratives  with  geological  and  evolutionary  knowledge  in  order  to  generate  a  watershed  consciousness  involving  the  Platte  River  that  spans  vast  scales  of  both  time  and  place.  I  juxtapose  Eiseley's  essay  with  a  quite  different  and  newly  emerging  effort,  the  Platte  Basin  Timelapse  project.  This  project,  organized  by  photographers  Mike  Forsberg  and  Michael  Farrell,  was  initiated  in  2011.  It  has  currently  placed  40  timelapse  cameras  throughout  the  Platte  Basin  watershed,  from  Colorado's  Lake  Agnes  at  11,000  feet  on  the  continental  divide  down  to  Plattsmouth,  Nebraska,  at  900  feet  elevation,  where  the  Platte  debouches  into  the  Missouri  River.  Each  of  these  cameras  takes  a  photograph  every  30  seconds,  which  are  then  combined  into  stunning  visual  displays  of  the  changing  characteristics  of  the  river  that  are  made  publically  available  via  the  internet  and  public  television.  As  planetary  water  resources  face  an  increasing  number  of  threats-­‐-­‐from  global  climate  change  and  alterations  in  rainfall  patterns,  to  toxic  pollution,  to  over-­‐appropriation  of  irrigation  waters  and  the  drawdown  of  ancient  aquifers,  to  the  commodification  of  water  by  corporate  interests-­‐-­‐few  would  argue  that  we  are  not  facing  a  planetary  water  crisis.  To  respond  to  that  crisis,  we  are  desperately  in  need  of  discovering  ways  to  generate  an  ethically  engaged  watershed  consciousness.  In  this  paper  I  analyze  these  two  projects  as  examples  of  ways  of  imaginatively  and  ethically  knowing  watersheds.    Poetic  Field  Research:  Enchantment  in  the  Mobile-­‐Bay  Watershed  Heidi  Staples  (University  of  Alabama)    In  The  Enchantment  of  Modern  Life,  political  theorist  Jane  Bennett  suggests  engaging  the  “everyday  marvels  in  order  to  uncover…the  ethical  potential  of  a  mood  of  enchantment.”  An  epistemology  of  enchantment  offers  an  affective  engagement  that  produces  deep  attachment  and  thus  regard,  concern,  care.  I  will  discuss  and  share  from  MIDDENS,  a  work-­‐in-­‐progress  that  uses  poetic  field  research  excursions  across  ‘America’s  Amazon’—the  Mobile  Bay  Watershed  in  Alabama,  the  third  most  biodiverse  area  in  the  United  States  and  my  recently  declared  place  on  the  planet—in  order  to  locate  the  enchantment  and  engagement  Bennett  describes.  This  work  includes  poems  written  in  response  to  a  weekend  at  the  Alabama  Coastal  Bird  Festival;  an  afternoon  touring  Chem  Waste  Landfill,  the  largest  hazardous  waste  site  in  the  U.S.  and  a  Certified  Wildlife  Habitat;  and  an  afternoon  at  Prewitt  Slave  Cemetery.  Multiple  other  excursions  are  planned  for  this  summer,  including  a  primitive  camping  experience  along  the  Bartram  Canoe  Trail.  Poetics,  political  theory,  and  ecofeminism  will  frame  the  reading  of  selected  poems  in  a  proposition  stating  that  through  actively  seeking  out  wonder  in  a  bioregion,  poets  can  become  enchanted,  an  experience  that  will  “propel  ethical  generosity.”    Speaking  wood:  the  world  of  materials  in  the  sculpture  of  Alberto  Carneiro  and  David  Nash  Daniela  Kato  (Hiroshima  Jogakuin  University)    Much  has  been  written,  in  recent  years,  about  the  “new  materialisms”  in  the  environmental  humanities.  And  much  has  been  made  of  their  potentially  radical  implications  in  terms  of  the  challenge  they  pose  to  normative  beliefs  about  human  agency  as  well  as  to  the  ways  in  which  human  beings  interact  with  the  non-­‐human.  It  is  my  contention,  however,  that  for  

artists  whose  practices  engage  directly  with  nature  and  the  landscape  unfathomable  concepts  such  as  “materiality”  and  “agency”  are  of  little  import.  What  these  artists  engage  and  interact  with  is  materials  –  their  affordances,  histories,  and  transformations.    My  paper  aims  to  discuss  the  ecological  implications  of  this  artistic  engagement  with  materials,  by  focusing  on  two  contemporary  European  sculptors  who  have  consistently  made  wood  the  core  material  of  their  art.  I  will  take  the  creative  practices  of  Alberto  Carneiro  (Coronado,  Portugal,  1937)  and  David  Nash  (Surrey,  UK,  1945)  as  examples  of  “knowledges-­‐in-­‐the-­‐making”  that  deeply  rethink  and  reintegrate  art,  life,  nature  and  landscape.  Underpinning  my  discussion  will  be  the  recent  work  of  anthropologist  Tim  Ingold  (2011,  2013),  particularly  his  determination  to  dislodge  materiality  and  agency  from  the  centre  of  academic  debate  on  material  culture,  and,  following  the  lead  of  sentient  practitioners,  to  restore  a  healthy  concern  with  materials  and  with  how  artists  grow  their  forms  into  existence.  This  bold  move  challenges  a  series  of  dichotomies  that  still  lie  at  the  heart  of  modern  anthropocentric  thought  and  whose  dead  hand  the  current  theoretical  emphasis  on  “materiality”  has  failed  to  remove:  the  division  between  the  mental  and  the  material,  between  the  organic  and  the  artefactual,  and,  ultimately,  between  nature  and  culture.  It  is  my  purpose  to  demonstrate  the  distinct  ways  in  which  the  sculptural  works  of  Carneiro  and  Nash  dissolve  such  dichotomies  and  return  artistic  practice  to  the  generative  flux  of  life,  by  reminding  us  that  “like  other  creatures,  human  beings  do  not  exist  on  the  ‘other  side’  of  materiality  but  swim  in  an  ocean  of  materials”  (Ingold  2011).    Presenter  Biographies    Tom  Lynch      Heidi  Lynn  Staples’  debut  collection,  Guess  Can  Gallop,  was  selected  by  Brenda  Hillman  as  a  winner  of  the  New  Issues  Poetry  Prize.  She  is  author  of  three  other  collections,  including  Noise  Event  (Ahsahta,  2013),  and  her  poetry  has  appeared  in  American  Poetry  Review,  Best  American  Poetry,  Chicago  Review,  Denver  Quarterly,  Ecotone,  Ploughshares,  Women's  Studies  Quarterly  and  elsewhere.  With  the  poet  Amy  King,  she  is  editor  and  founder  of  Poets  for  Living  Waters,  begun  as  an  international  response  to  the  BP  oil  disaster  in  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  and  of  Big  Energy  Poets  of  the  Anthropocene:  When  Ecopoetry  Thinks  Climate  Change,  forthcoming  from  BlazeVOX.  Currently,  she  teaches  in  the  MFA  program  at  the  University  of  Alabama  in  Tuscaloosa,  where  she  lives  with  her  husband,  daughter,  dog,  cat,  and  smartphone.    Daniela  Kato      F4:  Books  of  Nature:  Reworking  Pastoral    ‘And  be  myself  in  memory  once  again’:  cultural  memory  and  ‘real’  knowledge  in  John  Clare  and  Alice  Oswald.  Sue  Edney  (Bath  Spa  University)    In  this  paper,  I  will  explore  how  knowledge  and  memory  are  explored  in  the  work  of  two  poets,  John  Clare  and  Alice  Oswald,  through  their  reworking  of  classical  and  traditional  forms.  In  ‘The  Progress  of  Rhyme’,  for  example,  John  Clare  mimics  the  nightingale’s  song,  using  onomatopoeia  mingled  with  classical  pastoral.  By  doing  so  he  establishes  a  connection  between  the  human  and  non-­‐human  voice,  in  the  reality  of  his  present  moment  and  also  in  a  cultural  context  of  shared  experience  and  memory,  actual  and  literary.  This  was  Clare’s  

‘knowledge’;  a  blend  of  pragmatism,  poetics  and  emotional  instinct.  Although  poetic  language  can  be  restorative  and  compensatory,  the  attempt  to  re-­‐situate  materiality  –  the  ‘real’  –  in  a  narrative  can  disturb,  foreground  or  marginalise  other  meanings.  To  make  practical  use  of  memory,  in  the  form  of  past  cultural,  already-­‐known  and  knowable  poetics,  transforms  our  ability  to  know  and  to  re-­‐evaluate  past,  present  and  future  realities.  It  also  allows  poets  to  make  personal  knowledge  public  and  vice  versa.  In  Memorial,  Alice  Oswald  ‘re-­‐members’  Homer’s  Iliad  in  order  to  restore  its  ‘bright  unbearable  reality’,  not  just  a  public,  performed  ‘oral  cemetery’.  In  her  re-­‐creation  of  the  biographies  of  the  slain,  Oswald  allows  for  the  possibility  of  material  (bodily)  reconstitution  through  classical  and  modern  poetics.  Clare  and  Oswald  test  the  boundaries  of  the  knowable  in  personal  and  collective  cultural  memory  and  examine  how  we  are  ‘situated  to  experience  the  real’  (Foucault)  through  the  poetic  use  of  cultural  memory  in  the  immediacy  of  the  present  moment.    Cabinets  of  Curiosity  and  the  “Book  of  Nature”:  Coleridge,  Emerson,  and  Transatlantic  Science  Samantha  Harvey  (Boise  State  University)    This  paper  examines  a  central  motif  of  transatlantic  Romanticism:  “the  book  of  nature,”  or  the  idea  that  the  physical  landscape  can  be  “read”  as  a  book  of  spiritual  meaning  or  alternative  scripture.  Both  S.  T.  Coleridge  and  R.  W.  Emerson  had  epiphanic  experiences  of  reading  the  book  of  nature  during  their  visits  to  natural  history  museums,  including  John  Hunter’s  cabinet  of  curiosities  at  the  Royal  College  of  Surgeons  in  London,  otherwise  known  as  the  “Crystal  Gallery.”  Coleridge  described  the  Hunterian  museum  as  an  “august  temple”  where  “profound  ideas  concerning  Life  [are]  presented  to  us  in  a  more  perfect  language  than  that  of  words  -­‐  the  language  of  God  himself,  as  uttered  by  Nature.”  (“Theory  of  Life”  485-­‐6)  Similarly  in  the  third  volume  of  The  Friend,  which  Emerson  studied  carefully,  Coleridge  referred  to  the  Hunterian  as  revealing  “the  unspoken  alphabet  of  nature.”  (The  Friend  I  474)  Emerson’s  extensive  reading  in  Coleridge  primed  him  to  interpret  his  visits  to  natural  history  museums  in  Europe  (including  the  Hunterian,  which  he  visited  both  in  1833  and  1848)  as  exercises  in  reading  the  book  of  nature.  While  Coleridge  and  Emerson  similarly  described  nature  as  an  “alphabet,”  “transcript”  and  “cipher”  for  spirit,  there  were  certain  limits  in  place  since  the  “text”  of  the  book  of  nature  was  never  perfectly  readable.  This  paper  will  discuss  how  Coleridge’s  emotive,  intuitive,  and  imaginative  approaches  to  science  shaped  Emerson’s  essays  on  natural  history.    ‘green  void  […]  up  to  the  very  door’:  Colour  and  Food  in  J.  H.  Prynne’s  Post-­‐Pastoral  Daniel  Eltringham  (Birkbeck  College,  University  of  London)  (by  skype)    This  paper  will  offer  a  reading  of  J.  H.  Prynne’s  High  Pink  on  Chrome  (1975),  a  neglected  volume  by  a  major  late-­‐modernist  British  poet  and  a  complex  post-­‐pastoral  of  commodity  transformations  in  which  sheep  subject  to  pastoral  care  and  discipline  become,  in  their  final  form,  an  occasion  to  ‘pass  the  mint  sauce’,  and  ‘food  is  /  money  made  easy’.    Arguably  Prynne’s  first  experiment  with  post-­‐pastoral,  High  Pink  describes,  in  a  fractured  register  mediated  by  news  speak,  a  rural  tragedy  in  Iraq  in  1971.  Pink-­‐dyed  rice  was  imported  from  Mexico  and  eaten  by  Iraqi  farmers,  leading  to  widespread  mercury  poisoning.  The  rice’s  garish  colour,  like  the  volume’s  frontispiece,  warns  that  in  the  global  food  market  lethal  harm  can  be  microscopic,  and  synthetic  colours  can  replace  organic  ones;  green  too  is  also  supplanted  from  its  talismanic  position  in  ecocritical  discourse  and  subject  to  suspicion  about  its  status  as  emblematic  of  ‘nature’.    Such  hermeneutic  wariness  of  colour  is  important  to  Prynne’s  relationship  with  William  Wordsworth,  and  specifically  with  ‘Tintern  Abbey’,  a  poem  of  great  significance  for  Prynne.  

‘Hadstock  was  looking  good  the  other  day  when  we  passed  through  –  waves  of  green  void  lapping  right  up  to  the  very  door’,  Prynne  wrote  to  American  poet  Edward  Dorn  in  1976,  his  flippant  mangling  of  Wordsworth’s  ‘green  to  the  very  door’  hinting  towards  a  deep  engagement  with,  and  qualification  of,  a  Wordsworthian  ecological  epistemology  in  which,  as  Prynne  writes  elsewhere  on  ‘Tintern  Abbey’,  ‘what  is  first  wildly  green  is  later  how  the  green  runs  wild’.    F4  Presenter  Biographies    Sue  Edney      Samantha  Harvey  is  an  Associate  Professor  of  English  Literature  at  Boise  State  University.  She  is  the  author  of  Transatlantic  Transcendentalism:  Coleridge,  Emerson,  and  Nature  (Edinburgh  UP,  2013)  and  the  editor  of  Coleridge’s  Responses:  Coleridge  on  Nature  and  Vision  (Continuum,  2008).  She  has  also  written  articles  on  figures  in  Transatlantic  Romanticism  such  as  Coleridge,  Thoreau,  Emerson,  and  the  landscape  painter  Thomas  Cole.  She  is  the  organizer  of  a  public  lecture  series  called  “Interdisciplinary  Explorations:  The  Idea  of  Nature,”  which  is  now  in  its  fifth  year.    Daniel  Eltringham  is  working  towards  an  AHRC-­‐supported  PhD  at  Birkbeck  College  on  William  Wordsworth,  J.  H.  Prynne  and  the  commons.  He  has  published  on  R.  F.  Langley  and  Sean  Bonney,  with  a  book  chapter  forthcoming  on  Peter  Riley  and  a  commentary  on  Peter  Larkin.  His  poetry  and  translations  have  appeared  in  The  Clearing,  Intercapillary  Space,  Alba  Londres  6:  Contemporary  Mexican  Poetry  and  Scabs  are  Rats  Zine  4,  as  well  as  two  pamphlets,  Mystics  and  Ithaca.  He  co-­‐edits  Girasol  Press  and  The  Literateur.    F5:  New  Horizons  in  Medieval  and  Early  Modern  Ecocriticism      Cannibalism,  Ecophobia,  and  Titus  Andronicus  Simon  C.  Estok,  (Sungkyunkwan  University,  Seoul)    David  Goldstein  begins  an  important  discussion  of  the  consequences  for  the  Old  World  of  discoveries  of  “cannibalism”  in  the  New  World  with  an  observation  in  his  fascinating  Eating  and  Ethics  in  Shakespeare’s  England  (2014)  that  “an  analysis  of  Titus  [Andronicus]  in  an  American  context  shows  us  a  play  organized  around  misuses  of  cooking  and  eating  with  roots  not  only  in  classical  literature  but  in  the  behaviors  of  Iberian,  Brazilian,  and  Aztec  warriors”  (34).    The  startlingly  visceral  responses  the  play  evokes,  moreover,  hit  the  gut,  as  it  were,  of  our  anxieties  about  arbitrary  ethics,  about  why  one  kind  of  meat  is  more  acceptable  than  another,  about  the  proximity  of  the  human  and  nonhuman,  and  about  geographies  of  difference.  With  careful  attention  to  what  Sigfried  Schmidt  calls  “empirical  and  systemic  studies,”  my  talk  will  show  that  English  representations  of  cannibalism  detail  what  is  both  an  ecophobic  and  a  deeply  insular  and  xenophobic  set  of  boundaries  with  manifold  implications.    Earth's  Prospects  Lowell  Duckert,  (West  Virginia  University)    This  chapter  confronts  mountaintop  removal  mining  (MTR)  in  West  Virginia  and  Appalachia,  one  of  the  most  dire  environmental  issues  today,  on  unlikely  ground:  sixteenth-­‐  and  seventeenth-­‐century  notions  of  the  “prospect.”  Derived  from  the  Latin  prospectare  and  prospicere,  the  “prospect”  was  more  than  a  mining  term;  it  could  denote  that  which  faces  

forward  in  time  and  space,  the  relative  senses  of  such,  or  a  view  itself.  But  “prospect”  could  also  describe  an  action  –  to  face  forward,  to  situate,  and  the  anticipated  results  of  such.  I  will  focus  on  one  earthy  text  in  particular,  John  Milton’s  Paradise  Lost  (1667/74),  not  just  to  show  how  mining  has  devastating  ecological  consequences  (it  does),  but  also,  and  more  importantly,  to  argue  that  mining  is  an  ecotheoretical  means  of  conceptualizing  different  “prospect[s]  wide  /  And  various”  (5.88-­‐9),  a  way  of  wondering  about  better  futures  on  and  with  the  Earth/earth.  Earth  faces  the  human  in  prospective  directions;  the  look  downward  is  simultaneously  a  look  forward  in  time.  Borrowing  a  phrase  from  Deleuze  and  Guattari  who  believe  mines  are  non-­‐teleological  “lines  of  flight”  that  transport  bodies  across  “smooth  spaces”  of  becoming,  I  believe  that  mines  of  flight  have  the  ability  to  create  nature-­‐culture  assemblages  of  desire  in  addition  to  conditions  of  socio-­‐economic  squalor,  environmental  sickness,  and  geological  ruin.  Coalfield  sociologist  Rebecca  R.  Scott  has  recently  examined  the  (illogical)  “logic  of  extraction”  that  perpetuates  the  environmental  injustices  of  MTR.  My  hope  is  that  the  early  modern  “prospect”  alters  contemporary  debates  that  harmfully  divide  humans  from  the  landscape  and  pit  economic  interests  against  environmental  ones—offering  us,  instead,  prospective  futures  in  which  the  lives  of  both  humans  and  nonhumans  are  mutually  enriched.    The  Sea  Above  Jeffrey  J.  Cohen,  (George  Washington  University)    Around  the  year  1200  on  a  day  of  thick,  low  clouds,  some  churchgoers  saw  an  anchor  caught  upon  a  tombstone.  Its  taught  rope  stretched  skyward,  vanishing  into  the  overhanging  cloudbank.  A  man  shimmied  down  the  line,  pulling  himself  along  as  if  underwater.  The  parishioners  seized  the  sailor  from  the  sky  when  he  attempted  to  free  the  anchor,  and  he  drowned  in  the  humidity  of  “our”  air.  His  fellow  shipmen  could  be  heard  shouting  in  the  clouds  above.  When  he  did  not  respond  they  cut  the  rope  and  sailed  away,  leaving  corpse  and  anchor  at  that  ocean  floor  upon  which  we  dwell.  To  imagine  the  skies  a  sea  is  to  open  a  space  of  possibility,  danger  and  refuge.  Genesis  describes  God  separating  the  waters  which  preexist  his  commands  as  the  primal  act  of  creation.  Clouds  swell  and  flow  like  the  waves  they  are.  Air  is  a  living,  roiled  element.  The  heavens  are  the  domain  of  gods  or  demons,  but  from  time  to  time  a  more  human  story  may  be  glimpsed,  suspended  above  mere  earthly  dwellers.  Early  Irish  annals  record  airborne  ships.  Even  though  we  navigate  clouds  in  planes,  we  still  populate  the  skies  with  UFOs,  with  creatures  whose  unmoored  lives  are  not  our  own.  The  sea  above  offers  a  perilous  freedom  from  mundane  boundedness  –  and  perhaps  from  what  Dan  Brayton  has  called  our  terrestrial  bias.  This  essay  explores  what  becomes  possible  in  envisioning  water-­‐air  as  a  marinal  expanse  of  alien  familiarity,  a  space  of  traverse  and  encounter.  Dante  wrote  that  “The  sky  is  like  a  book  with  its  pages  spread  out  plainly,  containing  the  future  in  secret  letters.”  That  future,  it  seems,  includes  one  in  which  mariners  continue  to  appear,  bringing  with  them  a  perspective  on  earthly  dwelling  that  we  can  never  quite  believe,  contain,  or  long  hold.  To  view  the  earth  as  an  aerial  sailor  might  is  to  see  the  land  as  an  ecology  roiled  by  the  elements,  a  domain  larger  than  the  small  ambits  of  mere  human  inhabitation.  To  sail  the  sky  is  to  open  earthly  dwelling  to  the  possibilities  that  whirl  throughout  the  stormy  meeting  of  water  and  air  with  a  land  marked  by  tombstones  that  catch  but  cannot  hold,  a  land  that  gathers  people  into  small  churches,  a  land  in  which  an  ethereal  sailor  perishes  because  we  do  not  grasp  that  we  inhabit  someone  else’s  shifting  foundation.    Night’s  Black  Agents:  Shakespeare  and  the  Ecology  of  Night  Todd  Andrew  Borlik  (University  of  Huddersfield)    

In  the  ecocritical  imaginary,  habitat  is  all  too  often  framed  in  purely  spatial  terms.  Scant  attention  has  been  paid  to  the  night  as  a  spatiotemporal  habitat  unto  itself––one  whose  endangerment  in  post-­‐Edison  civilization  often  goes  unprotested.  Informed  by  recent  histories  of  the  dark,  such  as  Craig  Koslofsky’s  Evening’s  Empire  and  Paul  Bogard’s  The  End  of  Night,  this  paper  ransacks  Shakespeare’s  oeuvre  to  recover  the  spectrum  of  cultural  attitudes  toward  night  pre-­‐electrification.  In  Macbeth,  Shakespeare  associates  darkness  with  witchcraft  and  nocturnal  predation.  Fear  of  the  dark  can  thus  be  taken  as  symptomatic  of  the  “ecophobia”  Simon  Estok  diagnoses  as  endemic  in  the  early  modern  period.  Yet  Shakespeare’s  writing  also  captures  the  otherness  of  the  night,  exposing  the  limitations  of  diurnal  knowledge  and  of  human  dominion.  Some  Shakespearean  characters,  such  as  Falstaff  and  Shallow,  co-­‐exist  comfortably  with  the  darkness,  and  his  plays  feature  unforgettable  odes  to  the  night  as  the  ideal  environment  for  love,  revelry,  or  mystical  contemplation  of  the  sublimity  of  the  cosmos.  Shakespeare,  I  will  argue,  registers  the  ambiguous  impact  of  Copernican  Revolution,  which  triggered  an  epistemological  crisis  and  a  salubrious  de-­‐centering  of  humanity,  but  also  exacerbated  fear  of  darkness.  The  paper  thus  stakes  a  claim  for  the  importance  of  early  modern  literature  as  a  means  of  re-­‐capturing  the  ecological  mystique  of  the  pre-­‐electrified  night,  and  re-­‐learning  how  to  dwell  within  it  rather  than  obliterate  it.    F5  Presenter  Biographies    Simon  C.  Estok      Lowell  Duckert      Jeffrey  J.  Cohen      Todd  Andrew  Borlik      F6:  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  4:  Making  Energy  Visible      Darkness  Visible:  what  roles  do  the  materiality  and  traceability  of  coal  as  an  energy  resource  have  in  the  early  plays  of  D.  H.  Lawrence?  Robert  Butler  (Open  University)    The  coal-­‐mining  village  of  Eastwood,  eight  miles  west  of  Nottingham,  provides  an  unusually  vivid  perspective  on  energy  sources,  the  communities  that  were  convened  around  energy  extraction,  and  the  visibility  of  energy  systems  within  the  lives  of  working-­‐class  families.  D  H  Lawrence  spent  his  first  21  years  in  Eastwood  and  three  of  his  earliest  and  most  autobiographical  narratives  are  plays  set  in  this  coal-­‐mining  community.    A  liminal  figure  at  a  moment  of  great  transition,  Lawrence  existed  on  the  borderlands  of  an  agricultural  and  industrial  society,  a  working  class  and  a  middle  class,  and  popular  culture  and  High  Culture.  But  his  three  early  plays  -­‐  "A  Collier's  Friday  Night",  "The  Daughter-­‐in-­‐Law"  and  "The  Widowing  of  Mrs  Holroyd"  -­‐  are  richly-­‐textured  accounts  of  everyday  life.  In  these  plays  Lawrence  captured  "the  shape  and  sound  of  a  particular  way  of  living"  (Raymond  Williams)  and  was  "probably  the  first  English  playwright  to  write  truthfully  about  the  working  class"  (Peter  Gill).    Today  we  are  part  of  a  globalised  economy:  coal  accounts  for  40%  of  Britain's  electricity  and  85%  of  that  is  imported.  Where  it  comes  from  and  how  it's  consumed  has  become  largely  

invisible.  But  Lawrence's  early  plays  offer  -­‐  in  spite  of  all  the  hardship  they  depict  -­‐  a  readily  graspable  vision  of  a  connected  world  of  human-­‐energy  relations.    How  did  Lawrence  re-­‐imagine  the  spatial  interdependence  of  this  world  in  terms  of  theatre?  What  unmapped  areas  of  human  experience  does  he  open  up  in  these  three  accounts?  And  how  did  the  formal  attributes  of  the  theatre  of  his  day  -­‐  the  plays  were  written  between  1909  and  1911  -­‐  both  free  and  constrain  his  vision  of  this  world?    Oil’s  Afterlives  and  Affects:  Annie  Ross’  Happy  Birthday  Super  Cheaper    Deena  Rymhs  (UBC  Canada)    Annie  Ross’  Happy  Birthday  Super  Cheaper,  a  self-­‐published  volume  of  poetry  and  accompanying  installation  art,  re-­‐casts  normative  notions  of  value  by  recovering  the  discards  of  consumer  culture.  Named  after  a  former  gas  station  in  California  that  Ross  fondly  describes  as  a  “wacky”  mini  mart  “filled  with  papier-­‐mâché  life-­‐sized  elephants,  tigers,  and  giraffes  wearing  party  hats,”  Happy  Birthday  Super  Cheaper  consists  of  salvaged  items,  mainly  animal  figurines,  that  Ross  rescued  from  their  path  to  the  landfill.  Beneath  this  book’s  offbeat  playfulness  is  a  viewing  experience  difficult  to  characterize  in  its  affective  range:  the  small,  kitschy  installations  evoke  tenderness  and  surprise  while  haunting  the  viewer  with  the  violence  of  being  reduced  to  waste.  Ross’  transformation  of  the  unwanted  leavings  of  capitalism  emerges  as  an  ethical  and  spiritual  act  of  remediation.  My  paper  turns  its  focus  to  Happy  Birthday  Super  Cheaper’s  namesake  of  a  filling  station,  a  curious  detail  that  suggests  the  extent  to  which  oil  saturates  our  psychic,  social,  and  physical  worlds.  The  filling  station  disappears  from  view  in  the  collection  immediately  after  Ross  names  it  as  the  original  inspiration  for  this  art  series,  and  it  is  this  absent  presence  that  forms  a  critical  part  of  Ross’s  commentary  on  consumption,  attachment,  and  unrecognized  dependencies.  For  a  work  like  Happy  Birthday  Super  Cheaper,  whose  deep  ecology  emphasizes  human/non-­‐human  connections  while  blurring  categories  of  animate/inanimate,  there  couldn’t  be  a  more  fitting  example  than  oil  for  revealing  human  dependence  on  seemingly  lifeless  matter  (matter  that  is,  in  fact,  organic  and  slowing  decomposing)  or  the  murky  distinction  between  organic  and  inorganic  materials.  Ross  poetry  and  art  similarly  confront  the  extent  to  which  fossil  fuels,  automotive  culture,  and  capitalist  consumption  shape  our  attachments  and  our  ecologies,  but  her  work  offers  a  representational  frame  that  steps  out  of  the  economic  relations,  notions  of  value,  and  subjection  of  the  non-­‐human  world  underwritten  by  capitalism.      F6  Presenter  Biographies    Robert  Butler        Deena  Rymhs      

Panel  Session  G:  Friday  4th  September  10.45am-­‐12.15am  

 G1:  Dialogic  Interspecies  Ethics  Literary  Responses  to  the  Species  Boundary  in  Primate  Literature    Dialogical  ecofeminist  perspectives  in  “The  Moths”  by  Helena  María  Viramontes  and  “Women  Hollering  Creek”  by  Sandra  Cisneros  Imelda  Martín  Junquera  (Universidad  de  León)    This  proposal  intends  to  analyse  two  very  well-­‐known  stories  by  two  prominent  Chicana  writers  such  as  Viramontes  and  Cisneros  from  an  ecofeminist  perspective.  It  is  my  aim  to  approach  both  texts  having  in  mind  previous  analysis  that  have  been  published  as  well  as  to  introduce  an  innovative    theoretical  frame  that  contemplates  literary  texts,  women  and  nature  as  being  in  constant  conversational  relationships.    These  dialogical  relationships  subvert  the  traditional  domination  of  nature  promoted  by  patriarchal  cultures,  which  set  the  human  being,  especially  the  male  representative,  as  superior  to  other  living  entities  and  as  the  only  one  with  “agency”  thus  rendering  the  rest  as  passive.  Women,  traditionally  associated  with  nature  because  of  their  reproductive  and  nurturing  qualities,  have  been  discriminated  and  identified  with  that  passive  and  submissive  attitude  attributed  to  nature  as  well  as  other  ethnic  and  sexual  minorities.    Chicana  writers  from  the  1980  and  1990s  have  been  attempting  to  provide  agency  to  Chicana  women  and  the  natural  elements  they  portray  in  their  narratives  and  poetry.    A  very  clear  example  is  represented  by  Viramontes’  “The  Moths,”  where  even  the  title  states  the  importance  of  the  little  insects  in  the  story  as  well  as  that  of  the  three  generations  of  women  whose  lives  intersect  in  the  narrative.  Cisneros’  “Woman  Hollering  Creek”  deals  with  a  parallel  story  of  submission  and  resistance  in  which  a  dialogical  relationship  with  the  river  and  the  surrounding  nature  serves  to  provide  agency  to  the  protagonist.      Literary  Responses  to  the  Species  Boundary  in  Primate  Literature  Diana  Villanueva  Romero  (Franklin  Institute-­‐GIECO  /  University  of  Extremadura)    The  history  of  the  animal  liberation  movement  in  the  Western  world  reached  a  significant  point  with  the  foundation  in  1994  of  the  Great  Ape  Project  (GAP),  an  initiative  aimed  at  obtaining  the  recognition  of  three  basic  rights  for  great  apes:  the  right  to  life,  protection  of  individual  liberty,  and  prohibition  of  torture.  Although  this  international  movement  finally  led  to  failed  attempts  in  New  Zealand  and  Spain  to  gain  legal  rights  for  great  apes,  it  also  stirred  heated  debate  on  the  nature  of  human-­‐animal  relationships.    Traditionally,  in  the  sphere  of  fiction  writing,  the  ape  or  nonhuman  primate  has  been  since  antiquity  the  source  of  stories  that  played  with  the  definition  of  the  human  in  an  attempt  to  establish  the  ground  for  a  differentiation  that  would  save  face  for  the  Homo  sapiens.  Interestingly,  since  the  beginning  of  the  modern  animal  liberation  movement  in  the  1970s  and  thanks  to  the  development  of  scientific  fields  such  as  cognitive  ethology,  primatology,  and  trans-­‐species  psychology,  some  fiction  writers  have  produced  works  that  develop  new  ways  of  thinking  about  the  nonhuman  primate.  Some  of  them  show  the  potential  of  literature  to  suggest  alternative  forms  of  dealing  with  the  species  boundary,  thus  contributing  to  the  creation  of  the  counter-­‐hegemonic  strategies  deemed  necessary  by  Val  Plumwood  in  order  to  establish  a  balanced  relationship  with  the  more-­‐than-­‐human  world.    In  this  paper  two  novels,  Peter  Dickinson’s  Eva  (1988)  and  Peter  Goldsworthy’s  Wish  (1995),  will  be  contrasted  with  the  aim  of  showing  how  contemporary  literary  responses  to  human-­‐

nonhuman  primate  relationships  can  be  as  valid  a  form  of  thinking  about  the  animal  as  the  philosophical  roots  of  movements  such  as  the  GAP.    Humans,  Buggers  and  Pequeninos:  Alien  Voices  in  Orson  Scott  Card’s  Ender  Saga  Irene  Sanz  Alonso  (Franklin  Institute—GIECO/  University  of  Alcalá)    Science  fiction  is  populated  with  human  and  non-­‐human  characters  that  continuously  challenge  readers’  expectations  about  species  boundaries.  Many  of  the  works  classified  within  this  genre  only  portray  human’s  perspective  of  othered  creatures  such  as  aliens  and  robots,  without  offering  the  possibility  of  an  interspecies  dialogue.  But,  what  if  aliens  were  given  the  opportunity  to  communicate?  What  if  human  beings  were  able  to  understand  aliens’  fears  and  hopes?  In  Orson  Scott  Card’s  Ender’s  Game,  Speaker  for  the  Dead  and  Xenocide,  the  author  portrays  several  examples  of  interspecies  communication,  and  it  is  through  these  human-­‐alien-­‐artificial  intelligence  dialogues  that  the  protagonists  of  these  novels  propose  a  re-­‐classification  of  the  idea  of  otherness  based  on  pacific  cohabitation.    The  purpose  of  this  paper  is  to  analyze  the  ways  in  which  Scott  Card  rewrites  the  human-­‐alien  dualism  through  the  more  complex  Hierarchy  of  Foreignness  in  which  entities  are  not  classified  according  to  the  observer’s  (or  human)  perspective,  but  following  a  process  of  maturity  which  stems  from  the  understanding  of  the  other.  Using  Val  Plumwood’s  counter-­‐hegemonic  strategies  as  theoretical  framework,  this  paper  explores  how  the  survival  of  a  whole  planet  depends  on  an  unexpected  allegiance  of  human  and  nonhuman  species  that  are  able  to  pacifically  coexist  despite  their  differences.    G1:  Presenter  Biographies    Imelda  Martín  Junquera      Diana  Villanueva  Romero      Irene  Sanz  Alonso      G2:  Experiential  Landscapes    Ecopoetic  Knowledge  and  Text:  Self-­‐Reflexivity,  Relational  Landscape  and  Metaleptic  'Epistemontology'  in  Alexis  Wright's  The  Swan  Book  Arnaud    Barras  (University  of  Geneva)    The  knowledge  of  one's  surroundings  is  not  fixed  in  time,  but  rather  consists  in  a  constantly  evolving  set  of  propositions  (scientific,  social,  cultural,  legal,  etc.)  and  experiences  (including  emotions,  perceptions,  actions,  and  imaginations)  that  are  updated  through  trial  and  error.  An  individual's  ecological  knowledge  is  idiosyncratic;  it  arises  from  a  unique  four-­‐dimensional  interaction  between  the  organism  and  its  sociocultural  and  physical  environment.  On  a  societal  level,  transforming  this  incommensurable  epistemic  body  is  incredibly  arduous.  However,  the  literary  medium  has  the  potential  to  convey  a  form  of  knowledge  that  moves  beyond  individualism:  literary  narratives  have  the  ability  to  aestheticize  nonlinear,  dynamic  and  complex  systems  and  to  immerse  readers  in  a  fictional  world.    In  the  Australian  Aboriginal  episteme,  knowledge  (experiential  or  linguistic)  and  art  (plastic,  graphic,  or  performance)  are  ecological:  in  one  way  or  another,  they  always  refer  to  the  matrix  of  interdependence  and  intersubjectivity  of  Country.  In  this  essay,  I  argue  that  Alexis  Wright's  The  Swan  Book  dramatizes  an  indigenous  ecopoetic  way  of  knowing  that  reveals  to  

the  reader  the  enmeshment  of  organism  and  environment  and  that  invites  the  reader  to  reconsider  the  notion  of  Text  as  an  ecological  process.  Through  self-­‐reflexivity,  relational  landscapes,  and  a  metaleptic  "epistemontology"  (i.e.,  a  neologism  that  underscores  the  indivisibility  of  knowing  and  being),  The  Swan  Book  enables  readers  to  adjust  their  knowledge  system  and  adopt  what  Gregory  Bateson,  Tim  Ingold  and  Ted  Toadvine  have  respectively  called  a  "systemic  view",  a  "dwelling  perspective"  and  an  "ecophenomenological  understanding".    Savoir-­‐faire  of  the  elders:  knowing  and  doing  in  the  French  Mediterranean  hills  Marella    Hoffman  (University  of  Cambridge)    This  paper  draws  on  a  two-­‐year  ethnographic  project  with  an  89-­‐year-­‐old  shepherd  in  the  remote  hills  of  the  French  Mediterranean.  The  resulting  book  documented  the  self-­‐sufficient,  sustainable  lifestyle  of  the  shepherd’s  village  across  much  of  the  twentieth  century.    The  paper  takes  a  metaperspective,  unwrapping  the  different  levels  of  ‘green  knowledge’  that  nested  around  the  project  like  Russian  dolls.  It  explores  how  oral  and  written,  institutional  and  subjective  discourses  competed  and  cooperated  around  the  village.    At  the  centre  is  Monsieur  Marty,  the  shepherd  who  spoke  260  pages  of  detail  on  how  the  villagers  herded  goats,  hunted,  foraged,  grew  food-­‐gardens  and  lived  sustainably  from  the  land.  This  green  know-­‐how  was  hugely  valued  by  the  culture  that  taught  it  to  him,  then  discarded  by  consumerism,  and  is  now  again  so  precious  that  the  authorities  wanted  it  gathered  from  him,  the  ‘lone  survivor’  of  that  eco-­‐system.    All  around  us  were  the  technological  achievements  of  the  village  council:  wind-­‐turbines,  a  reed-­‐bed  sewer-­‐system,  a  solar  farm.  But  while  climate-­‐change  impacted  harder  each  year,  the  shepherd’s  first-­‐hand  eco-­‐knowledge  was  about  to  be  lost  because  no-­‐one  could  get  him  to  talk.    While  he  and  I  sat  in  the  dust  for  twenty-­‐six  two-­‐hour  interviews,  the  academic  knowledge  frameworks  that  I,  his  ethnographer,  brought  with  me  also  hung  in  the  air  behind  us,  like  flies.      This  engaging  presentation  uses  maps,  photos  and  audio  to  explore  how  picking  through  successive  tangles  of  green  knowledge  can  enrich  our  ecological  initiatives.    Taiwanese  environmental  poets:  eco-­‐colonial  and  eco-­‐centric  themes  Peter  I-­‐min  Huang  (Tamkang  University)    In  this  paper,  Peter  I-­‐min  Huang  ecocritically  reads  the  poetry  of  Taiwanese  poet  Ka-­‐hsiang  Liu  (劉克襄),  Taiwanese-­‐Chinese  poet  Guangzhong  Yu  (余光中),  Paiwan  poet  Mona  Neng  (莫那能),  and  Atayal  poet  Walis  Nokan  (瓦歷斯．諾幹).  His  main  focuses  are  Liu’s  “At  Kaohsiung  Station”  (在打狗驛),  a  veiled  critique  of  Taiwan’s  petrochemical  industry  and  the  heavy  concentration  of  petrochemical  plants  in  the  south  of  Taiwan;  Yu’s  “Train  Passing  Fang  Liao”  (車過枋寮),  a  poem  that  nostalgically  evokes  Taiwan’s  agricultural  past  yet  offers  the  contemporary  reader  opportunity  to  engage  with  current  debates  about  the  decline  of  Taiwan’s  agricultural  sector;  and  Walis  Nokan’s  “Mountain  is  a  School”  (山是一座學校)  and  Mona  Neng’s  “When  the  Bell  Rings”  (鐘聲響起時).  Huang  situates  the  last  two  works  in  a  growing  body  of  postcolonial  ecocriticism  studies  that  address  the  history  of  “eco-­‐colonialism”  in  Taiwan  as  this  has  especially  affected  Aboriginal  people.  He  also  draws  on  a  definition  of  ecopoetry  that  Ann  Fisher-­‐Wirth  and  Laura-­‐Gray  Street  provide  in  their  introduction  to  The  Ecopoetry  Anthology  (2013).    G2  Presenter  Biographies  

 Arnaud  Barras    Former  Cambridge  academic,  Marella   Hoffman   had  previously   lectured  and   researched  at  universities   in   France,   Switzerland  and   Ireland.  Now  a  Fellow  of   the  Royal  Anthropological  Institute,   she   has   worked   extensively   with   government,   using   ethnographic   oral   history  methods   to   circumvent   conflict   and   generate   community   solutions.   Her   projects   boosting  the  civic  participation  of  poor  and  ethnic  communities  have  been  taught  as  positive  practice  models   by   government   agencies.   As  well   as  writing   books   for   academic   publishers,   she   is  chief  editor  of  a  public  policy  magazine  for  government  in  Cambridge,  communicating  policy  to  poorer  communities.      Having  completed  a  Freudian  psychoanalysis  with  a  Fellow  of  Cambridge  University,  her  research  interests  include  migration,  identity-­‐politics,  orality  and  the  way  narratives  shape  social,  political  and  economic  structures.  She  is  a  co-­‐author  of  international  books  like  Location  and  Dislocation  -­‐  Emigration  and  Irish  Identities;  Human  Rights  and  Good  Governance  -­‐  Building  Bridges;  and  Cross-­‐Currents  in  European  Literature.  Recent  solo  books  include  the  ethnography  Savoir-­‐faire  of  the  Elders  -­‐  Green  knowledge  in  the  French  Mediterranean  hills  (Cahiers  de  la  Salce,  August  2015,  written  and  published  in  French)  and  Asylum  under  dreaming  spires  -­‐  Refugees’  lives  in  Cambridge  (for  the  Refugees’  Living  Archive,  University  of  East  London,  September  2015).  Her  forthcoming  book,  Hidden  gold  -­‐  Using  contemporary  oral  history  to  shape  public  policy,  will  be  published  across  the  English-­‐speaking  world  by  Left  Coast  Press  in  the  US.  She  has  published  a  bilingual  book  of  poetry  on  landscape  in  English  and  French,  and  her  bilingual  book  of  landscape  fiction,  In  the  Eagle’s  Eye,  will  be  published  in  2016.    To  see  her  awards  and  publications  or  to  contact  her,  visit  www.marellahoffman.com      Peter  I-­‐min  Huang  holds  the  position  of  Associate  Professor,  English  Department,  Tamkang  University,  Taiwan.  He  served  as  Chair  of  the  English  Department  for  two  terms,  2008-­‐2012,  during  which  time  he  also  was  the  conference  organizing  chairperson  for  the  The  Fifth  Tamkang  International  Conference  on  Ecological  Discourse  (17-­‐18  December,  2010)  and  The  Fourth  Tamkang  International  Conference  on  Ecological  Discourse  (23-­‐24  May,  2008).  His  areas  of  teaching  and  research  include  animal  studies,  ecocriticism,  ecofeminism,  ecopoetry,  women’s  studies,  and  postcolonialism.  Dr.  Huang  specializes  in  English,  Chinese,  and  Taiwanese  literatures.  His  most  recent  publications  are  “Canon  Formation  in  the  Study  of  the  Environment  in  China  and  Taiwan”  and  “Rediscovering  local  environmentalism  in  Taiwan”  published  in  CLCWeb:  Comparative  Literature  and  Culture  16.4  (December  2014).  Other  publications  include:  “Corporate  Globalization  and  the  Resistance  to  It  in  Linda  Hogan’s  “People  of  the  Whale  and  the  poetry  of  Sheng  Wu,”  East  Asian  Ecocriticisms:  A  Critical  Reader  (Palgrave  Macmillan  2013)  and  “Exploring  Non-­‐Human  Ethics  in  Linda  Hogan’s  Power  and  Timothy  Morton’s  Ecology  without  Nature,”  Forum  for  World  Literature  Studies  (2014).  Dr.  Huang  is  currently  completing  a  monograph  on  Linda  Hogan  and  Taiwanese  environmental  writers.    G3:  Botanical  insights    Knowledge  Growth  and  Sustainability:  A  View  from  Biosemiotics  Timo  Maran  (University  of  Tartu)    

An  essential  principle  of  sustainable  development  is  to  keep  human  technological  development  and  use  of  resources  within  the  carrying  capacity  of  the  biosphere.  Human  knowledge  appears  to  grow,  however,  without  any  borders  (Kull  1998).  This  paradox  is  the  central  topic  of  my  presentation:  how  can  ever-­‐growing  knowledge  support  sustainable  development?  We  have  shown  elsewhere  that  human  ability  to  use  symbolic  sign  systems  for  accumulating  knowledge  is  deeply  related  with  environmental  degradation  (Maran,  Kull  2014).  Probably  most  obstructive  to  sustainable  development  are  highly  abstract  knowledge  systems  that  tend  to  forget  their  history  and  connection  to  their  original  context.  Humans  act  upon  environment  on  the  basis  of  their  knowledge  and  imprint  their  semiotic  character  onto  other  living  organisms  and  matter.  This  can  have  deterring  effects  for  sign  action  of  other  organisms  (Maran  2014).  At  the  same  time,  in  some  biological  phenomena  (mimicry,  biophony,  cf.  Kull  2010)  it  has  been  noticed  that  knowledge  is  spread  and  maintained  by  many  species  in  biological  community.  I  propose  that  human  knowledge  can  be  sustainable  if  it  remains  connected  to  such  "ecological  codes".  In  other  words,  human  knowledge  is  sustainable  if  human  action  makes  sense  to  the  other  inhabitants  of  the  biosphere.        ‘From  the  mute  distance  of  things  a  sign  must  come’:  stones  and  the  ‘semiosphere’  Shelley    Saguaro  (University  of  Gloucestershire)    This  paper  builds  on  theoretical  work  by  Jesper  Hoffmeyer,  Wendy  Wheeler,  Jane  Bennett,  Louise  Westling  and,  in  particular,  Timo  Maran  and  ‘Biosemiotic  Criticism’.  These  theories  are  extended  to  stones  in  an  approach  posited  here  as  ‘Lithosemiotic  Criticism’.  The  paper  briefly  outlines  ‘traditional’  and  indigenous  relations  to  stones,  such  as  their  importance:  in  world-­‐wide  religions  and  rituals;  for  artefacts;  as  co-­‐inhabitants  in  Native  American  and  other  cultures.  Leslie  Marmon  Silko  notes  that  the  prevailing  human  apprehension  of  landscapes,  including  stones,  ‘assumes  the  viewer  is  somehow  outside  or  separate  from  the  territory  she  or  he  surveys’  whereas  ‘viewers  are  as  much  a  part  of  the  landscape  as  the  boulders  they  stand  on.’  (Silko,  Yellow  Woman,  27)    However,  it  is  the  late  work  of  Italo  Calvino  (Cosmicomics,  Mr  Palomar  and  the  posthumously  published,  Six  Memos  for  the  Next  Millennium)  that  is  the  main  focus  here,  for  Calvino’s  repeated  attention  to  the  signifying  vibrancy  of  stones.    The  closing  words  of  his  last  publication  take  up  a  similar  point  to  that  made  by  Silko,  and  are  further  informed  by  his  extensive  reading  of  science,  natural  history  and  philosophy.    Calvino’s  last  invocation  constitutes  the  starting  point  of  this  paper’s  ‘lithosemiotic  critical’  position:  ‘Think  what  it  would  be  to  have  a  work  conceived  from  outside  the  self,  a  work  that  would  let  us  escape  the  limited  perspective  of  the  ego,  not  only  to  enter  into  selves  like  our  own  but  to  give  speech  to  that  which  has  no  language  […]  to  stone,  to  cement,  to  plastic  …..’.  (Calvino,  Six  Memos,122)    Fifty  Shades  of  Green:  Imagining  Phytocentric  Perspectives  on  Human  Life  Felix  Sprang  (Ludwig-­‐Maximilians-­‐Universitaet  Muenchen)    In  my  presentation  I  would  like  to  take  the  Platonic  topos  of  man  as  an  inverted  tree  (homo  arbor  inversa)  as  a  point  of  departure  and  argue  that  we  should  rethink  how  we  construe  plant  life  vis-­‐à-­‐vis  animal  and  human  life.  There  are  many  ways  of  knowing  plants,  from  "Gardeners'  Questioning  Time"  to  bioengineering.  However,  all  these  ways  of  knowing  reduce  plants  to  entities  providing  resources  (food,  oxygen,  medicine)  or  giving  pleasure.  We  empathise  with  animals  but  we  have  lost  the  culture  of  seeing  the  world  from  the  plant's  perspective.  Knowledge  of  plant-­‐animal  communication  is  mostly  generated  in  the  field  of  pest  control,  and  few  scientific  studies  look  at  the  interaction  between  humans  and  plants  as  both  agents.  While  pharmacology  and  dietetics  have  scrutinized  the  dependency  of  humans  

on  plants,  ecocriticism  and  environmentalism  have  largely  subscribed  to  the  narrative  that  we  must  protect  plants,  thus  further  incapacitating  plants.  I  would  like  to  trace  an  emergent  idea  in  ecocriticism  that  challenges  that  narrative:  the  notion  that  seeing  the  world  from  the  plant's  perspective,  and,  consequently,  imagining  phytocentric  perspectives  on  humans,  can  radically  question  what  we  know  about  the  natural  world.  My  examples  for  that  emerging  field  come  from  poetry,  and  it  is  my  contention  that  innovative  metaphors  and  similes  are  best  suited  for  imagining  plant  life  as  a  life  with  agency.  I  will  discuss  attempts  to  construe  knowledge  from  a  phytocentric  perspective  in  the  poetry  of  Erasmus  Darwin,  John  Clare,  and  Alice  Oswald.  Ultimately,  though,  these  thought  experiments  in  poetic  form  are  discussed  as  forays  into  a  (largely)  forgotten  plant-­‐human  relationship  that  could  be  at  the  heart  of  imagining  new  ways  of  knowing  the  natural  world  as  we  enter  the  anthropocene.    G3  Presenter  Biographies    Timo  Maran      Shelley  Saguaro      Felix  Sprang      G4:  Early  Modern  to  Miltonic  environmentalism    Knowing  the  Garden:  Finding  our  Roots  in  John  Milton’s  Eden  Elizabeth  Cook  (University  of  Birmingham)    Hannah  Arendt  once  denounced  the  human  expression  of  a  desire  to  return  to  a  more  ‘natural’  or  more  biocentric  state  of  human  existence  as  ridiculously  naïve,  arguing  that  it  would  constitute  a  regression  to  a  more  primitive  anthropological  state.  My  proposed  paper  will  ask  why  it  is  that  we  need  nature,  and  why  we  feel  as  though  we  must  ‘go  back’  to  it  –  why  it  is  so  often  considered  a  separate  entity  unto  ourselves,  and  why  we  feel  we  must  rediscover  our  ‘roots’.  It  will  attempt  uncover  the  significance  of  these  roots  as  portrayed  in  John  Milton’s  literary  depiction  of  the  Garden  of  Eden  in  his  biblical  epic  Paradise  Lost.  It  will  do  so  in  an  attempt  to  address  and  unearth  the  meaning  of  ‘knowing  nature’  in  relation  to  our  own  lives,  and  in  particular  how  it  relates  to  our  own  sense  of  wellbeing  and  health.  This  paper  will  discuss  these  views  in  relation  to  Milton’s  depiction  of  the  dramatic  change  in  the  humanity-­‐nature  relationship  following  the  original  sin  and  the  subsequent  impact  of  this  shift  on  the  way  we  think  about  ‘knowing’  nature,  and  how  our  perceptions  are  influenced  by  such  literature.  Furthermore,  it  will  examine  Milton’s  initial  depiction  of  Adam  and  Eve  as  stewards  of  the  natural  world  in  relation  to  our  own  contemporary  conservation  efforts,  and  conversely  our  the  Fall  of  Adam  and  Eve  and  our  own  interference  with  and  exploitation  of  the  natural  world,  as  we  work  towards  defining  the  concept  of  ‘green  knowledge’.    Endarkenment  Environmentalism:  The  Anthropocene  as  a  shadow  New  Atlantis  Matthew  Griffiths    The  notion  that  we  inhabit  the  Anthropocene,  in  which  humanity  itself  constitutes  the  status  of  a  geological  force,  gains  cultural  traction  in  part  because  it  seems  to  represent  the  fulfilment  of  a  long-­‐held  ambition  –  specifically,  the  project  of  dominating  nature.  This  paper  will  argue  that  this  project  crystallised  with  the  emergence  of  humanism  in  the  early  modern  era,  and  will  read  a  text  of  this  period  for  the  knowledge  that  it  anticipates  but  is  unable  to  exhibit.    

In  his  1627  work  The  New  Atlantis,  Francis  Bacon  imagines  the  utopian  island  of  Bensalem,  one  of  whose  inhabitants  tells  the  narrator:  “The  end  of  our  foundation  is  the  knowledge  of  causes,  and  secret  motions  of  things;  and  the  enlarging  of  the  bounds  of  human  empire,  to  the  effecting  of  all  things  possible.”  This  paper  will  propose  that  the  Anthropocene  represents  the  ultimate  achievement  of  this  agenda,  enlarging  “the  bounds  of  human  empire”  as  far  as  possible;  but  also  that  this  dominance  has  resulted  from  not  knowing  “the  secret  motions  of  things”  to  which  Bacon  refers.    I  contend  that  the  Anthropocene  instead  represents  the  accumulation  of  what  we  have  ruled  out  as  side  effects,  in  the  terms  of  Ulrich  Beck’s  sociology  of  risk.  Using  Beck’s  work,  I  will  show  that  humanity’s  wish  to  attain  “knowledge  of  causes”  is  not  the  foundation  of  our  power,  as  in  Bacon’s  formulation,  but  a  retrospective  attempt  to  account  for  the  unanticipated  power  to  “effect  all  things  possible”.        ‘Witness  ye  Springs,  ye  Meads  and  Groves’:  Foregrounding  the  Background  in  the  Pastorals  of  Aphra  Behn  Heidi  Laudien  (Manhattan  College)    Aphra  Behn  (1640-­‐1689)  liked  green  spaces.    She  employed  them  in  every  genre  of  her  writing  throughout  the  entirety  of  her  career.  From  her  drama  to  her  prose  fiction  to  her  personal  correspondence,  green  spaces  abound—she  even  gifted  in  green,  sending  “a  Bottle  of  Orange-­‐flour  Water”  to  an  acquaintance  (O’Donnell,  entry  040).21  Is  this  what  it  means  to  be  green  in  the  Renaissance?    In  his  2011  study,  What  Else  Is  Pastoral?  Renaissance  Literature  and  the  Environment,  Ken  Hiltner  argues  that  even  though  Renaissance  pastoral  is  frequently  concerned  with  literal  landscapes,  it  “does  little  to  describe  them”  and  does  not  “offer  detailed  representations  of  the  environment?”.22  Hiltner’s  argument  falls  short,  however,  because  he  fails  to  consider  the  contributions  of  women  writers  such  as  Aphra  Behn.  Behn  wrote  pastorals  that  describe  the  literal  landscape  in  ways  that  were  bold,  original  and  detailed.  Even  her  contemporaries  recognized  her  innovations  with  the  form  and  freely  commented  on  her  compelling  landscapes.23  Despite  anxieties  over  art’s  ability  to  represent  nature,  a  point  that  Hiltner  suggests  as  to  why  writers  sidestepped  writing  the  landscape,  Behn  wrote  pastorals  that  deploy  mimesis,  making  a  “green  reading”  possible.  Through  a  close  reading  of  her  pastorals,  I  argue  that  Behn’s  landscapes  destabilize  existing  notions  of  the  pastoral  space  as  an  idealized  and  organized  place  and  disorientate  the  reader’s  conventional  expectations  of  pastoral  nature.  Instead  of  avoiding  representing  nature,  Behn  relishes  doing  so  in  the  very  manner  that  Hiltner  argues  is  absent  from  pastoral  poetry  of  the  time.    G4  Presenter  Biographies    Elizabeth  Cook      Matthew  Griffiths      

21 O’Donnell, Mary Ann. An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. New York: Garland, 1986. 22 Hiltner, Ken. What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment. Ithaca: Cornell UP (2011): 2-4. 23 See stanza five of Kendrick’s dedicatory poem, “To Mrs. B. on her Poems” that prefaces Lycidus: Or, the Love in Fashion (1688).  

Heidi  Laudien  is  an  Associate  Professor  in  the  Department  of  English  at  Manhattan  College  where  she  has  been  teaching  for  the  last  15  years.    She  has  published  on  Aphra  Behn  and  Elizabeth  Singer  Rowe  and  is  currently  on  sabbatical  working  on  a  book-­‐length  project  on  the  contributions  of  early  modern  women  to  the  pastoral.    G5:  Contemporary  Poetry    Ways  of  Knowing  in  the  Poetry  of  Philip  Gross  Hugh  Dunkerley  (University  of  Chichester)    Philip  Gross’s  work  has  long  referenced  poetry  as  a  kind  of  via  negativa,  as  suggested  in  the  title  of  his  collection  The  Egg  of  Zero  (2006).  Since  then  his  work  has  continued  to  mine  a  particular  seam  of  poetic  subtraction.  In  this  paper  I  will  be  examining  the  ways  in  which  images  of  the  non-­‐human  in  his  work  are  used  to  examine  the  limits  of  knowledge,  but  also  to  suggest  the  potential  for  dwelling  in  a  more-­‐than-­‐human  world.  In  particular,  I  will  be  looking  at  the  poems  and  photos  in  his  collaborative  collection  I  Spy  Pinhole  Eye,  the  images  of  water  in  The  Water  Table  and  the  chronicling  of  his  father’s  aphasia  in  Deep  Field.    On  Touch  and  Vision:  Kathleen  Jamie’s  Bodies  Alan  Macpherson  (University  of  Aberdeen)    A  central  concern  of  Kathleen  Jamie’s  recent  work,  in  both  poetry  and  prose,  has  been  the  recuperation  of  bodily  nature.  It  is  her  contribution  to  overcoming  what  she  refers  to  as  the  ‘foreshortened  version  of  nature  […that  it’s]  all  primroses  and  otters’.  As  she  writes  in  ‘Pathologies’,  ‘[t]here’s  our  own  intimate,  inner  natural  world,  the  body’s  weird  shapes  and  forms,  and  sometimes  they  go  awry’  (Sightlines,  p.  24).  Jamie’s  writing  of  the  damaged,  diseased,  and  fragmented  human  body  is  informed  by  anatomical  illustrations,  the  objects  collected  in  anatomy  museums,  her  encounters  in  a  pathology  lab,  and  her  own  experience  of  illness  and  recovery.  Each  of  these  offers  a  variation  on  attentiveness,  whether  in  the  explorative  inquiry  of  the  nineteenth  century  anatomist,  the  technologically  mediated  vision  of  the  pathologist,  or  the  gaze  of  the  artist.  These  varied  modes  of  looking  and  touching  which  filter  through  her  writing  make  for  a  body  of  work  charged  with  productive  representations,  yet  also  riven  by  unexpected  tensions.  My  paper  will  negotiate  a  path  through  this  strand  of  Jamie’s  recent  work  by  considering  the  relationship  that  emerges  between  vision,  touch  and  writing,  and  between  the  perceiving  body  and  the  body  perceived.  I  will  begin  by  asking  how  such  diverse  modes  of  perception  –  scientific,  medical  and  artistic  –  come  together  in  Jamie’s  writing  in  order  to  help  us  reconsider  our  understanding  of  the  human  body  within  the  natural  world.    Material  States  of  Poetry:  the  Creative  Collaborations  of  Simon  Armitage’s  Stanza  Stones  Project  Emma  Trott  (University  of  Leeds)    At  the  2011  Ilkley  Literature  Festival,  Simon  Armitage  premiered  six  poems  that  were  to  be  carved  onto  separate  stones  on  the  Pennine  watershed  in  West  Yorkshire.  Each  poem  describes  water  in  a  different  state  (rain,  beck,  mist,  snow,  dew,  puddle),  and  while  the  poems  stand  individually,  they  comprise  a  poetic  ecology.  The  project  was  collaborative:  for  example,  Armitage’s  words  were  inscribed  by  stone-­‐mason  Pip  Hall.  This  generates  enquiry  into  the  nature  of  creativity,  while  moments  when  the  stone’s  size  or  surface  demanded  a  shortening  of  words  reveal  one  aspect  of  this  material  poetics.  In  accompanying  discursive  texts,  Armitage’s  description  of  his  creative  process  suggests  it  is  organic:  material  and  

accumulative.  The  Yorkshire  landscape  is  central,  both  literally  and  ideologically,  as  are  interactions  between  the  stone-­‐poems  and  their  audience.  This  paper  explores  Armitage’s  public  art  project  in  the  context  of  contemplating  the  nature  of  21st-­‐century  ecopoetics,  where  ‘ecopoetics’  means  a  manifested  understanding  of  relationship  between  organic  and  poetic  forms,  with  an  ethical  consciousness.  The  Stanza  Stones  privilege  water’s  mutability.  That  material  transformation  is  connected  with  concerns  about  environmental  degradation,  and  the  stones  have  the  potential  to  become  gravestones  memorialising  an  ecosystem  that  is  currently  at  risk.  They  embody  Stacy  Alaimo’s  ‘recognition  not  just  that  everything  is  interconnected  but  that  humans  are  the  very  stuff  of  the  material,  emergent  world’:  in  this  unique  project,  poet  and  audience  are  changed  by  experience  of  the  landscape,  and  the  poetry  is  absorbed  by  the  landscape,  which  becomes  neither  human  nor  non-­‐human  but  a  composite  mix.    G5  Presenter  Biographies    Hugh  Dunkerley      Alan  Macpherson  is  a  second  year  AHRC  funded  PhD  student  in  English  &  Visual  Culture  at  the  University  of  Aberdeen  working  on  contemporary  ecopoetics  (broadly  conceived)  and  intermediality.    Emma  Trott      G6:  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  5:  Communities  and  energy    Shifting  energy  identities  within  community  owned  renewable  energy  initiatives  Jarra  Hicks  (U  of  New  South  Wales,  Australia)  Communities  are  increasingly  engaged  in  energy  transitions  to  cleaner  sources  and  more  efficient  use,  often  driven  by  a  desire  to  take  positive  action  on  climate  change  and  to  secure  energy  from  clean,  renewable,  local  sources  (Walker  &  Devine-­‐Wright  2007:  Seyfang  et  al  2013;  Hopkins  2008;  Bulkeley  &  Moser  2007).  The  processes  and  outcomes  from  establishing  community  owned  renewable  energy  initiatives  are  expanding  the  range  of  viable  options  for  driving  modern  energy  transitions,  opening  the  local  as  an  important  source  of  action  and  innovation  (Mulugetta  et  al  2010;  Cameron  &  Hicks  2014).  In  countries  with  well-­‐developed  community  energy  sectors,  such  as  Germany,  Denmark  and  Scotland,  the  collective  impact  of  these  projects,  in  terms  of  mega-­‐watts  of  installed  renewable  energy  generation  or  local  economic  return,  is  significant  (Yildiz  et  al.  2015).      But  what  have  community  owned  renewable  energy  projects  contributed  to  local  people’s  own  sense  of  self  and  their  sense  of  community  and  place?  How  has  being  involved  in  these  projects  changed  their  relationship  to  energy  and  technology?    Drawing  on  a  series  of  interviews,  focus  groups  and  participant  observation  with  two  Australian  case  studies,  I  explore  these  questions  and  their  implications  for  shifting  energy  identities.  Through  participation  in  community  owned  renewable  energy  initiatives,  people’s  relationship  with  technology  and  energy  is  shifting,  as  is  their  sense  of  agency,  all  of  which  have  implications  for  their  identity  as  a  community  member  and  an  energy  citizen.  The  stories  that  emerge  from  interviews  and  observation  are  used  to  analyse  the  contribution  of  community  owned  renewable  energy  initiatives  to  creating  the  conditions  needed  for  broader  societal  transitions  to  clean  energy  futures.    

Solar  Sanctuaries  and  the  Parable  of  the  Good  Samaritan:  Ethical  Narratives  of  Renewable  Energy  and  Energy  Conservation  Michael  S  Northcott  (University  of  Edinburgh)    Churches  in  the  Scottish  Borders  which  identify  as  ‘Scottish  Ecocongregations’  are  investing  time  and  money  in  conserving  energy  and  adopting  renewable  power  in  church  buildings.  Exemplary  action  by  churches  in  siting  solar  panels  on  the  roof  of  the  sanctuary  is  also  reported  to  influence  other  church  members  and  citizens  in  installing  solar  panels  on  their  homes.  Energy  and  environmental  activists  in  congregations  in  Selkirk  and  Moffat  identify  the  New  Testament  injunction  to  love  the  neighbour  in  the  story  of  the  Good  Samaritan  as  motive  for  their  investment  in  energy  conservation  and  renewable  energy.  Narrating  the  transition  to  renewable  power,  and  energy  conservation,  as  planetary  good  neighbourliness,  church  members  indicate  that  they  accept  the  scientific  account  that  greenhouse  gas  emissions  are  harming  the  environments  of  farmers,  fishers  and  other  persons  in  other  parts  of  the  world,  and  of  future  generations.  This  conception  of  planetary  neighbourhood  represents  a  spatial  and  temporal  reconfiguration  of  the  narrative  of  the  Good  Samaritan,  in  which  transition  to  renewable  action  is  represented  as  neighbourly  action  which  conserves  the  climate  of  people  and  species  in  places  distant  in  time  and  space  from  those  initiating  such  actions.    The  story  of  hydro  energy  from  land  of  K2:  Socio  cultural  influences  of  Tarbela  power  project  Humera  Farah  (Bahria  University,  Islamabad,  Pakistan)  The  majestic  Himalayan  range  of  Pakistan  carries  K2,  2nd  highest  mountain  in  the  world,  along  with  vast  glaciers,  providing  melt  water  for  Indus  and  other  rivers.  Tarbela  hydro  project  is  located  on  Indus  River,  remotely  in  North  West  province  of  Pakistan.  Completed  in  1974,  it  is  the  largest  earth  filled  dam  in  world  and  second  largest  by  volume.  This  article  presents  an  interdisciplinary  examination  of  socio-­‐cultural  influences  of  Tarbela  hydro  project  through  historical  texts,  documentaries  and  personal  accounts.  Being  an  indigenous  renewable  energy  source,  it  is  portrayed  among  custodians  of  Pakistani  society;  augmenting  culture  of  transformation,  introduced  through  imported  fossil  fuels  derived  electrification.  It  pours  inexpensive  3700  MW  into  national  grid,  meeting  approximately  20%  of  country’s  power  needs.  Being  multifaceted,  it  also  stores  water  from  Indus  River  for  irrigation,  controls  floods  and  serves  as  a  well-­‐known  recreational  area;  hence  improving  agro-­‐based  livelihood,  providing  employment,  saving  life  and  infrastructure  downstream.  Through  land  acquisition  for  its  build  up,  135  villages  were  downed  and  96,000  people  were  displaced.  Although  the  national  resettlement  policy  was  not  developed  then,  agricultural  land  owners  were  agreed  to  be  compensated  with  cultivable  acreage  in  other  provinces.  However,  many  of  displaced  people  still  ponder  in  courts  for  restitution.  Some  refused  to  migrate,  terming  it  a  forced  ethnic  displacement.  For  those,  not  eligible  for  agricultural  land,  new  villages/colonies  were  built  along  the  fringe  of  the  reservoir;  though  civic  amenities  such  as  education,  health  and  environment  require  improvement.  For  many  others  in  surrounding  communities,  project  has  solely  fetched  conservation  of  impoverishment.    G6  Presenter  Biographies    Jarra  Hicks        Michael  S  Northcott        Humera  Farah        

 Panel  Session  H:  Friday  4th  September  

1.15pm-­‐2.45pm    

H1:  Children’s  books  and  the  environment    Ecocriticism  and  children’s  narratives:  contemporary  representations  of  disability  Lara  Bober  (McGill  University)    Beginning  with  a  review  of  articulations  of  ecocriticism  and  its  significance  for  ecopedagogy  and  children’s  literature,  this  essay  draws  on  the  conceptual  resources  of  these  debates  to  analyse  representations  of  illness  and  (dis)ability  in  recently  published  award-­‐winning  fiction  for  children.    Classic  children’s  literature  is  replete  with  flattened  representations  of  disability  invoking  notions  of  sentimentality  or  sympathy;  often  depictions  of  characters  with  disabilities  are  included  as  literary  symbolism  or  to  emphasize  moral  decisions  of  other  characters  (Curwood,  2013).    Studies  of  contemporary  children’s  and  young  adult  literature  have  concluded  that,  despite  many  positive  shifts  in  public  thinking  and  in  the  educational  sector,  literary  representations  tend  to  homogenize,  essentialize,  and  marginalize  experiences  of  disability.    Positive  social  change  can  be  discerned  in  the  introduction  of  literary  awards  focusing  on  representations  of  disability  such  as  the  American  Library  Association’s  Schneider  Family  Book  Award.    This  essay  will  argue  that  positive  representations  of  child  protagonists  living  with  illness  and/or  (dis)ability  serve  two  concurrent  objectives:  these  stories  provide  counter-­‐narratives  (Mitchell  &  Snyder,  2000;  Curwood,  2013)  which  emphasize  children’s  capabilities  and  self-­‐advocacy,  while  at  the  same  time  providing  pedagogical  tools  to  educate  young  readers  about  ecology  through  wonder  and  imagination  (Greene,  1995;  Lesnik-­‐Oberstein,  1998;  Maagerø  &  Østbye,  2012).    Additionally,  environmental  themes  in  children’s  literature  provide  a  counterpoint  to  constraints  imposed  by  architecture  as  well  as  pathological  perspectives  focusing  solely  on  medical  intervention.    Compelling  depictions  of  children’s  interactions  with  natural  environments  bring  into  relief  the  barriers  created  by  social  environments.    Children’s  literature  can  also  provide  an  enduring  contribution  to  public  debates  on  the  social,  historical  and  cultural  positioning  of  disability,  leading  to  new  ways  of  conceptualizing  environmental  ethics.    What  did  she  say?  Secondary  school  students’  responses  to  a  book  title.  Nina  Goga  (University  of  Bergen)    A  recently  published  article  (Bergthaller  et  al.  2014,  s.  262)  pinpoints  the  fact  that  “the  ecological  crisis  is  not  only  a  crisis  of  the  physical  environment  but  also  a  crisis  of  the  cultural  and  social  environment”  (p.  262).  Thus,  the  climate  challenges  of  our  time  should  be  studied  not  just  through  the  texts  and  speeches  of  nature  scientists  and  environmental  politicians,  they  should  be  understood  through  language  itself.  The  climate  challenges  are  also  about  how  language  limits,  shapes  and  makes  perceptible  and  sensible  the  world  in  which  we  live  our  lives,  in  which  life  grows  and  takes  shape.  The  task  of  understanding  how  language  usage  can  decide  the  future  of  the  earth  is  complicated  and  challenging.  Who  should  be  challenged  to  take  on  this  challenge?  Politicians,  economists,  scientists?  Absolutely.  But  also  educational  systems  that  shape  and  prepare  the  youth  for  a  future  in  which  the  biodiversity  is  threatened  and,  as  a  consequence,  language  as  well  as  it  becomes  less  diverse.  In  our  efforts  to  take  care  of  our  environment  as  a  basis  of  future  life,  it  is  essential  that  we  also  take  care  of  language,  to  preserve  linguistic  sensitivity,  nuances  and  diversity.    

In  my  research  I  have  studied  how  secondary-­‐school  students  respond  to  the  challenging,  and  unusual,  verbal  and  visual  representations  of  nature  and  climate  change  in  the  Norwegian  crossover  picturebook  poem  Hva  var  det  hun  sa?  (2014,  What  did  she  say?)  by  Agnar  Lirhus  and  Rune  Markhus.24  The  aim  of  this  project  is  to  study  whether,  and  if  so,  how,  the  reading  of  experimental  and  ecopoetic  literature  may  influence  students’  thoughts  about  nature.  How  do  they  express  their  responses  to  the  text?  Is  their  linguistic  repertoire  sufficient  or  do  they  have  to  tip-­‐finger  through  the  landscape  of  language?    Ecological  disaster  in  Vytautas  Petkevičius  book  for  children  Didysis  medžiotojas  Mikas  Pupkus  Inga  Mitunevičiūtė  (The  Institute  of  Lithuanian  Literature  and  Folklore  and  The  Martynas  Mažvydas  National  Library  of  Lithuania)    During  the  period  of  soviet  regime  in  Lithuania  to  speak  openly  about  the  devastating  nature  was  equal  to  condemn  yourself  to  get  several  years  in  prison.  The  huge  difference  between  reality  and  what  propaganda  of  ideal  society  and  clean  environment  proclaimed  impelled  writers  to  look  for  indirect  express  of  their  ecological  ideas.  There  will  be  used  a  hypothesis  in  the  lecture  that  in  this  case  children‘s  literature  and  genre  of  fairy  tales  is  a  way  to  discuss  risky  topics  using  specifics  and  instruments  contained  in  children‘s  literature.  The  genre  of  falsehood  tales  will  be  approached    as  a  part  of  Aesopus  language  used  during  Soviet  times  –  a  part  which  indicates  the  search  of  genre  and  language  that  allows  the  realistic  description  of  ecological  situation.  The  lecture  contains  discusion  of  Vytautas  Petkevičius  (1930-­‐2008)  book  for  children  „Didysis  medžiotojas  Mikas  Pupkus“  using  an  angle  of  ecocriticism.  The  book,  which  lacked  recognition  and  actualization  at  the  time  of  publishing  in  1969,  now  suprises  us  with  progressive  ecological  ideas;  we  find  that  hyperboles  and  litotes  are  used  in  describing  interaction  between  nature  and  human  beings,  disastrous  effects  on  nature  exerted  by  humans,  ecological  crisis  caused  by  them  and  possible  postapocalyptic  results,  human  responsibility,  moral  and  ethic  basis  for  his  actions  are  also  pointed  out  here.    H1  Presenter  Biographies    Lara  Bober      Nina  Goga  is  an  associate  professor  at  Bergen  University  College,  Norway.  Her  most  recent  publications  are  Gå  til  mauren.  Om  maur  og  danning  i  barnelitteraturen  (2013,  On  Ants  and  Bildung  in  Children’s  literature),  “Kart  og  krim.  Litterære  kart  og  steders  betydning  i  krimserier  for  barn”  (2014,  Maps  in  Crime  fiction  for  children),  “Learn  to  read.  Learn  to  live.  The  Role  of  Books  and  Book  Collections  in  Picturebooks”  (2013)  and  “Children  and  Childhood  in  Scandinavian  Children’s  Literature  over  the  Last  Fifty  Year”  (2013).    Inga  Mitunevičiūtė      H2:  Un/Reframing  modes  of  attention    Of  'Ferny,  Mossy  Discoveries':  Digitally  Modeling  the  Landscapes  of  Mary  Webb’s  Gone  to  Earth  Alicia  Peaker  (Middlebury  College)    As  the  practice  of  close  reading  begins  to  make  way  for  distant  reading  (Moretti),  digital   24 The research is part of a research project on Nature in Children’s literature at Bergen University College, Norway.

tools  and  methods  are  opening  up  new  ways  of  understanding  and  reading  literature.  But  as  of  yet,  there  are  few  digital  projects  which  take  as  their  subject  environmental  literature  (the  collaborative  work  of  Stephanie  Posthumus  and  Stéfan  Sinclair  being  a  notable  exception).  The  increasing  usefulness  of  digital  methods  to  textual  analysis  raises  several  questions:  How  might  the  ecosystems  and  landscapes  of  novels  be  represented  digitally?  Can  we  develop  useful  digital  models  for  better  contextualizing  human  characters  within  the  fictional  natural  worlds  they  inhabit?  And  what  impacts  might  such  models  have  on  the  ways  we  read  and  understand  literatures  of  the  environment?    I  begin  to  address  these  questions  through  a  scaled  reading  (both  close  and  distant)  of  Mary  Webb’s  1917  novel  Gone  to  Earth.  The  novel,  set  in  Shropshire,  is  filled  with  the  presence  of  living  things.  Webb’s  textual  representations  of  the  natural  world  often  take  the  form  of  adjectives,  similes,  and  metaphors:  the  protagonist  Hazel  Woodus  is  “tawny  and  foxlike”  and  “sexless  as  a  leaf.”  The  natural  world  is  invoked  at  least  as  frequently  as  it  is  directly  represented.  Do  such  distinctions-­‐-­‐between  an  actual  and  invoked  natural  world-­‐-­‐matter  in  our  understanding  of  the  novel?  By  digitally  modeling  the  shifting  relationships,  presences,  and  absences  of  the  natural  world,  as  represented  in  the  novel,  I  argue  that  Webb’s  strategy  of  invocation  animates  the  landscapes  she  has  created  and  draws  strong  connections  between  the  human  characters  and  their  environments.    Stretching,  Bending,  Breaking  the  Frame:  Possibilities  in  Green  Popular  Culture  John  Parham  (University  of  Worcester)      Critics  have  frequently  deployed  ‘framing’  to  characterise  how  media  and  popular  culture  allegedly  divert  our  understanding  of  land,  animals,  and  environmental  issues  towards  anthropocentric  or  ideological  perspectives.  Examples  encompass  Anders  Hansen’s  work  on  environmental  news  coverage  and  Paula  Willoquet-­‐Maricondi’s  stringent  critique  of  mainstream  cinema.  Yet  the  metaphor  of  framing  –  fixing  things  into  place  –  is  too  static  for  a  dialectical  ‘media  ecology’  (which  corresponds  to  ecology’s  own  fluidity).  This  paper:    • Summarises  the  influence  of  framing  on  green  media/cultural  studies.    • Couples  methodological  critiques  of  frame  analysis  with  an  understanding  that  green  popular  culture  should  be  characterised  not  through  framing  but,  rather,  as  a  complex,  contradictory  conjunction  (Sean  Cubitt)  of  ideological  and  ecological  imperatives.    • Provides  a  case  study  –  the  recurrent  deployment  of  the  romantic  narrative  frame  in  popular  environmental  culture.  While  often  underwriting  patriarchal  or  heterosexual  norms,  romance  is  contradictory.  For  example,  both  fluctuations  in  romance  plots  (Jean  Radford)  and  tampering  with  the  genre  itself  have  been  applied  to  represent  equivalent  discordance  in  ecological  relations  –  whether  our  dual  affinity  with/estrangement  from  ‘nature’  or  the  complexities/compromises  of  social  ecology.    • Discusses  Isao  Takahata’s  anime  Only  Yesterday.  The  film  melds  rural  nostalgia  and  disillusion  with  capitalist  modernity  via  Taeko,  an  office  worker,  re-­‐evaluating  her  life  during  a  summer  working  on  her  relative  Toshio’s  farm.  Their  hesitant  romance,  and  her  tentative  decision  to  stay,  foregrounds  the  uncertain  and  provisional  nature  by  which  we  commit  (if  at  all)  to  nature  and  romance  alike.    Screening:  Cacophonous  Silence  and  introduction  (by  Skype)  Jess  Allen  (University  of  Manchester)  and  Bronwyn  Preece  (University  of  Huddersfield,  Canada)      We  offer  for  screening  at  Green  Knowledge  our  site-­‐specific,  trans-­‐national,  collaborative  

film:  Cacophonous  Silence  (The  Sound  of  Falling  Wildly)  –  falling  beautifully  into  your  solicited  niche  for  ‘avant-­‐garde  ecopoetics’,  telematically  transcribed  through  ‘experimental,  emergent  new  discourses.’  The  8-­‐minute  film  is  the  visual  product  of  a  performance  experiment  in  eco-­‐activism:  an  attempt  to  interrogate  and  articulate  our  respective  relations  to  notions  of    ‘The’  and  ‘our  own’  wild,  exploring  our  very  ‘knowing  and  unknowing  of  the  natural  world.’  Forming  two  (virtual)  arboreal  arcs  over  the  northern  hemisphere,  the  film  sets  out  to  capture  a  somatic  and  movement-­‐based  re-­‐conception  of  the  ancient  Zen  koan:  ‘If  a  tree  falls  in  the  forest,  and  no  one  is  there  to  hear,  does  it  still  make  a  sound?’    This  slow  performance  began  with  a  ceremonial  exchange  of  written  words,  scribed  and  mailed  to  each  other  on  handmade  paper,  wildcrafted  from  the  bioregional  plant  fibers  that  had  fallen  on  our  respective  forest  floors.  Once  received  these  paper  ‘tablets’  were  taken  on  a  reciprocal  journey  by  each  performer  into  ‘their’  woods  and  became  witness  to  a  filmed  improvisation  with  a  simple  score:  an  exploration  of  our  own  bodies  falling  in  place.  What  can  our  own  wild  falling  -­‐  our  commitment  to  fall,  to  be  hurt,  to  embrace  uncertainty  together  and  trans-­‐nationally  –  reveal  about  how  we  might  respond  to  a  falling  wild  in  an  era  of  anthropogenic  ecological  crisis?      Rough  Beasts:  Predators  and  Man.  Rewilding  the  human  imagination  from  the  caves  to  cyberspace  Nicholas  Foxton  (Kingston  University)    The  large  mammalian  predators  that  we  shared  most  of  our  evolutionary  history  with  survive  in  ever  decreasing  numbers  but  still  haunt  our  imaginations.  This  paper  looks  back  at  the  iconography  of  the  apex  predators  from  the  Paleolithic  to  the  present,  in  a  range  of  art,  mythology  and  literature  and  forward  to  the  contemporary  implications  of  the  restorative  ecological  strategy  of  ‘rewilding’.      Rewilding  is  an  attempt  to  restore  ecological  ‘balance’  or  ‘harmony’  within  seriously  degraded  ecosystems  of  the  developed  world.  The  most  controversial  element  is  the  idea  of  predator  reintroductions,  which  is  a  particular  concern  in  the  European  context.  Whilst  we  evolved  as  a  species  alongside  the  same  charismatic  megafauna  that  adorn  our  art,  literature  and  imaginations  (the  same  species  hunted  as  trophy  animals  by  great  white  hunters  wielding  ochre  or  more  recently  cameras  or  rifles)  ,  the  idea  of  rewilding  as  a  means  of  re-­‐establishing  a  supposed  ecological  balance  frequently  founders  on  the  issue  of  the  predators.  Our  relationship  with  the  predators  extends  back  to  the  Paleolithic.  This  paper  looks  at  the  iconography  of  some  of  the  Old  World  Big  Cats,  considers  the  theoretical  implications  of  rewilding  and  explores  two  British  case  studies  that  point  the  way  forward  to  how  rewilding  has  and  might  transform  the  British  Isles.    H2  Presenter  Biographies    Alicia  Peaker  is  currently  the  Council  on  Library  and  Information  Resources/Digital  Library  Federation    (CLIR/DLF)  Mellon  Postdoctoral  Fellow  in  the  Digital  Liberal  Arts  at  Middlebury  College  in  Vermont.  Her  dissertation,  “Our  English  Ground”:  Women,  Literature,  and  the  Environment,  1900-­‐1950  explored  how  women  writing  in  Britain  in  the  first  half  of  the  twentieth  century  contributed  to  ecological  discourses  through  representations  of  the  natural  world  and  nationalism.  During  her  doctoral  work  at  Northeastern  University,  she  also  worked  as  the  Co-­‐Director  of  the  award-­‐winning  digital  humanities  project  Our  Marathon:  The  Boston  Bombing  Digital  Archive,  as  the  Project  Manager  for  The  Women  Writers  Project,  and  as  the  Development  Editor  for  GradHacker.  Her  current  work  sits  at  the  intersection  of  

literary  studies,  ecocriticism,  and  digital  humanities.      John  Parham      Jess  Allen  is  an  aerial  dancer,  ecological  performer  and  walking  artist  from  Aberystwyth,  Wales  with  a  yurt,  a  horse  and  a  dog.  She  is  currently  doing  a  (second)  PhD  in  walking  and  moving  in  rural  landscapes  as  an  eco-­‐activist  arts  practice,  with  a  President’s  Doctoral  Scholarship  from  the  University  of  Manchester.  She  uses  walking  to  create  unexpected  performative  encounters  in  unusual  locations.  Originally  a  biologist,  she  gained  her  first  PhD  from  Aberystwyth  before  re-­‐training  in  contemporary  dance,  latterly  at  Coventry  where  she  was  awarded  an  MA  with  distinction  in  Dance  Making  and  Performance.  She  has  worked  as  landscape  officer,  dance  lecturer  (anatomy/improvisation),  arts  facilitator  and  aerial  performer  for  Blue  Eyed  Soul  (UK/US),  Full  Tilt  and  everyBODY  dance.    allinadayswalk.org.uk  |  dropintheocean.org.uk  |  tiltingatwindmills.org.uk  |  trans-­‐missions.org.uk    Bronwyn  Preece  lives  off-­‐the-­‐grid,  in  a  solar  and  waterwheel-­‐powered  house  in  Canada.  She  is  an  improvisational  performer,  community  applied  theatre  practitioner,  walking  eARThist  and  the  pioneer  of  earthBODYment.  She  is  currently  doing  a  PhD-­‐at-­‐a-­‐distance  through  the  University  of  Huddersfield,  examining  the  embodiment  of  ecology  and  disability.  She  holds  a  MA  and  BFA  in  Applied  Theatre.    She  has  presented  at  both  ASLE  USA  and  ALECC  conferences.    She  facilitates  workshops  internationally,  and  has  published  in  the  Canadian  Theatre  Review,  Phenomenology  and  Practice  and  forthcoming  in  the  Contemporary  Theatre  Review,  among  other  publications.    She  is  also  the  author  of  Gulf  Islands  Alphabet  (2012),  In  the  Spirit  of  Homebirth  (2015)  and  the  forthcoming  Off-­‐the-­‐Grid  Kid  (2015).  She  served  six  years  in  local  politics,  being  the  youngest  woman  ever  elected  to  her  post,  operating  under  a  'green'  mandate.    www.bronwynpreece.com    Nicholas  Foxton  is  a  Fractional  Lecturer  in  Humanities  at  Kingston  University.  He  has  worked  as  a  mountain  guide  in  the  Greater  Ranges,  Wildlife  Photographer,  and  is  currently  climbing  the  biggest  trees  that  he  can  find  in  preparation  for  a  canopy  research  project  in  the  Peruvian  Amazon  (www.onetreeinabillion.com)    H3:  Marine  and  Littoral  Explorations    The  Green  Zone:  Avant-­‐garde  Explorations  of  the  Shoreline  through  a  Radical  Landscape  Approach  Veronica  Fibisan  (University  of  Sheffield)    The  natural  world  has  been  shifting  rapidly,  triggering  a  wave  of  new  poetry  as  a  response.  This  paper  aims  to  look  into  the  way  in  which  Harriet  Tarlo,  Wendy  Mulford  and  Zoë  Skoulding  use  fact  and  folklore  in  their  work  in  order  to  portray  the  surrounding  world.  The  British  shoreline  provides  the  essential  space  for  these  three  poets  to  zonate  their  interactions  and  experiences,  also  acting  as  a  vibrant  and  dynamic  backdrop  for  the  experimental  ego  to  thrive.  By  connecting  the  shoreline  writings  of  these  three  key  female  poets  we  can  expand  our  understanding  of  the  relationship  between  the  human  and  non-­‐human  world  and  the  way  in  which  they  influence  one  another.  I  shall  be  looking  at  coastal  poems  found  mainly  in  Harriet  Tarlo’s  ‘Poems  1990-­‐2003’  (2004),  Wendy  Mulford’s  ‘The  Land  Between’  (2009)  and  Zoë  Skoulding’s  ‘Tide  Tables’  (1998).    The  research  also  seeks  to  underline  the  contrasts  between  the  terms  that  govern  contemporary  nature  poetry,  and  the  benefits  of  an  interdisciplinary  approach  which  hinges  on  the  use  of  fact  in  their  writing.  

Through  inner  and  outer  explorations  of  the  self  and  the  coastline,  nature  poetry  has  the  potential  to  establish  itself  as  a  beneficial  cross-­‐cultural  genre.  The  paper  will  investigate  the  field  work  done  by  the  poets  and  the  ways  in  which  these  exploratory  acts  of  imaginative  research  raise  awareness  of  the  threats  facing  the  British  shoreline  and  the  potential  means  of  its  preservation.    Nature’s  Song:  Human-­‐Cetacean  Collaborations  in  David  Rothenberg’s  Thousand  Mile  Song  Micha  Gerrit  Philipp  Edlich  (Gutenburg-­‐Universität  Mainz)    The  philosopher,  musician,  composer,  and  writer  David  Rothenberg  not  only  attentively  listens  to  natura  loquens  and  carefully  observes  natura  agens,  but  he  also  loves  to  strike  up  conversations,  and  he  loves  to  play.  In  a  variety  of  artistic  and  academic  projects,  Rothenberg  has  used  his  diverse  professional  background  to  explore  the  shifting  boundaries  between  nature  and  culture  as  well  as  between  homo  sapiens  and  nonhuman  animals.  For  example,  Rothenberg  has  taken  his  clarinet  and  high-­‐tech  equipment—hydrophone,  headphones,  amplifier,  underwater  speakers,  and  so  on—to  the  world’s  oceans  and  jammed  with  an  unlikely  cast  of  musical  collaborators:  sperm  whales,  killer  whales,  and  other  larger  cetaceans.  These  performances  across  species  lines,  as  captured  in  Rothenberg’s  nonfiction  book  Thousand  Mile  Song  and  the  accompanying  sound  recording  (2008),  must  be  partly  understood  in  the  context  of  several  related  historical  processes.  Historians  of  science  such  as  D.  Graham  Burnett  have  identified  the  numerous  intersections  between  the  scientific  exploration  of  dolphins  and  other  marine  mammals  after  World  War  II,  the  subsequent  exploitation  of  these  nonhuman  animals  by  the  military-­‐industrial  complex  and  the  entertainment  industry,  the  increasing  (and  certainly  not  accurate)  perception  of  cetaceans  as  benign  countercultural  icons  and  gentle  nonhuman  intelligences,  as  well  as  the  music  of  and  about  whales,  which  has  been  available  since  the  late  1960s.  Rothenberg,  in  his  musical  collaborations  with  whales,  self-­‐consciously  engages  with  these  developments  and  their  respective  histories,  which  both  commonly  and  perhaps  unavoidably  tend  to  privilege  the  human  over  the  nonhuman.  In  contrast,  Thousand  Mile  Song  notably  records  attempts  to  let  the  more-­‐than-­‐human  world  speak,  within  certain  obvious  limits,  on  its  own  terms,  and  it  explores  the  possibilities  and  limits  of  music  (very  broadly  defined)  as  a  necessarily  imperfect  tool  of  interspecies  communication.  This  paper,  which  will  focus  on  Thousand  Mile  Song  but  also  consider  related  collaborative  projects,  aims  to  combine  insights  from  critical  animal  studies,  ecocritical  perspectives  on  music,  environmental  philosophy,  as  well  as  the  history  of  science  in  order  to  show  that  in  the  case  of  Rothenberg,  the  phrase  natura  loquens,  natura  agens  does  not  merely  reflect  the  rather  belated  acknowledgement  that  there  is  a  dynamic,  material  more-­‐than-­‐human  world  with  considerable  agency,  a  world  that  requires  (at  least)  ethical  regard  and  humility  from  humans.  Here,  the  phrase  also  serves  to  emphasize  the  importance  of  interaction  and  communication  between  all  elements  of  and  nonhuman  and  human  agents  within  the  more-­‐than-­‐human  world.  Nature’s  song,  as  recorded  in  Thousand  Mile  Song,  is  not  a  tightly  scripted  human  solo  imposed  on  a  silent  audience  or  played  in  an  anthropocentric  echo  chamber,  but  a  messy  duet  or  polyphonous  chorus  requiring  the  active  participation  of  all  singers,  human  and  nonhuman.    Ethical  Changes  and  Ecological  Crisis  in  The  Old  Shoal  Xie  Qun  (Zhongnan  University  of  Economics  and  Law,  Wuhan,  P.R.)    The  ecology-­‐themed  novel  The  Old  Shoal,  published  in  2008  by  Zhou  Jianxin,  relates  the  story  about  fishermen  and  the  sea  animal  that  took  place  in  a  small  fishing  village  in  

Liaodong  Peninsula  of  Northeastern  China,  starting  from  the  1980s  to  the  early  21st  century.  Tracing  the  changes  of  life  of  three  generations  of  fishermen,  the  novel  reveals  the  relationship  between  ethical  changes  and  ecological  crisis  with  the  changing  social  and  economic  setting.  Examining  the  relationship  between  an  experienced  old  fisherman—Old-­‐Mast  Fan,  and  the  marine  animals,  I  intend  to  analyze  the  ethical  and  ecological  views  of  the  traditional  fishermen.  The  Confucianist  ecology  enables  fishermen  like  Fan  to  establish  a  harmonious  relationship  with  the  sea  and  among  all  the  villagers.  In  the  second  part,  I  will  explore  how  the  utilitarian  turn  of  the  society  ruins  the  younger  generation’s  eco-­‐consciousness  and  brings  devastation  to  the  marine  animals  of  all  kinds.  Meanwhile  the  diminishing  sea  animals  threaten  the  survival  of  the  fishermen  and  ruin  their  fraternity.  The  third  part  will  focus  on  Big-­‐Shore  Feng,  son  of  a  fisherman,  who  initiates  a  new  mode  of  mariculture  by  establishing  the  beach  tourism  at  the  old  shoal.  The  innovation  not  only  brings  revival  of  sea  animals  but  also  restores  the  fraternity  of  the  villagers.  The  arguments  that  I  want  to  raise  is  that  ethics  and  ecology  are  interrelated.  Excessive  pursuit  of  wealth  may  destroy  both  man  and  the  sea.  In  the  tension  between  human’s  growing  need  for  a  better  life  and  the  diminishing  number  of  sea  animals,  man  has  to  seek  for  a  way  out  by  restoring  traditional  Confucianist  ecology  and  creating  new  mode  of  marine  economy.    H3  Presenter  Biographies    Veronica  Fibisan      Micha  Gerrit  Philipp  Edlich      Xie  Qun  got  her  Ph.D  from  Department  of  English,  The  Chinese  University  of  Hong  Kong,  in  2004.  Her  research  interest  includes  modern  drama  studies,  ethical  and  ecological  criticism,  identity  issues  in  literature,  and  comparative  cultural  studies.  She  has  published  two  books  and  nine  essays  on  modern  drama  and  fiction,  and  has  translated  six  English  novels  and  literary  criticism  into  Chinese.    H4:  Cli-­‐Fi,  Nineteenth  to  the  Twenty-­‐First  Century    Reflections  on  the  Potential  of  Climate  Fiction  at  the  Threshold  of  the  Anthropocene      Gregers  Andersen  (University  of  Copenhagen)  As  an  increasing  number  of  fictive  depictions  of  anthropogenic  climate  change  fill  popular  culture  a  reflection  on  what  fiction  can  offer  the  contemporary  cultures  of  climate  change  seems  appropriate.  Hence  the  paper  will  point  to  two  functions  intrinsic  to  what  now  goes  under  the  increasingly  popular  term  climate  fiction  or  cli-­‐fi.  Drawing  heavily  on  the  work  of  French  philosopher  Paul  Ricoeur,  the  paper  will  first  state  that  there  is  a  genuine  need  for  fictions  that  take  the  new  worlds  made  probable  by  climate  science  as  their  departure  point,  simply  because  fictions  can  help  human  beings  cognitively  adapt  to  new  worldly  conditions.  Following  up  on  Ricoeur’s  remark  that  “the  first  way  human  beings  attempt  to  understand  and  master  the  ‘manifold’  of  the  practical  field  is  to  give  themselves  a  fictive  representation  of  it”,  the  paper  will  through  examples  demonstrate  how  climate  fiction  functions  as  a  laboratory  where  potential  options  and  modes  of  existence  for  the  future  are  tested.  Continuing  from  here,  the  paper  will  then  go  on  to  explicate  how  the  emphasis  on  the  aforementioned  cognitive  function  in  Ricoeur’s  writings  often  appear  alongside  reflections  on  what  Ricoeur  calls  the  productive  reference  or  the  ability  of  fictions  to  create  reality.  Thus  the  paper  will  point  to  another  more  utopian  function  of  climate  fiction,  namely  as  being  a  place  where  new  modes  of  existence  appear.    

 Climate  change  and  reconsidering  established  ways  of  knowing  in  Into  the  Forest  and  Flight  Behaviour  Sophia   David  (University  of  Exeter)    I  examine  how  our  current  ways  of  knowing  are  confounded  by  climate  change  and  suggest  that  both  the  consequences  of  climate  change  and  pro-­‐environmental  behaviour  require  new  forms  of  knowledge.  Many  of  the  suggested  methods  to  mitigate  climate  change  demand  a  reconceptualisation  of  our  established  ways  of  knowing,  whether  this  relates  to  governance,  economy,  ideologies  or  perceptions  of  nature.  I  discuss  the  representation  of  these  debates  in  Jean  Hegland’s  Into  the  Forest  (1996).  The  novel  shows  how,  in  order  to  survive,  the  two  female  protagonists  need  to  adapt  their  thinking  towards  new  philosophies.  I  demonstrate  how  the  catastrophe  (though  unspecified,  it  is  hinted  to  be  a  consequence  of  climate  change)  forces  them  to  reconceive  their  existence  and  way  of  knowing.  I  address  the  effects  and  consequences  of  change  in  one’s  environment,  arguing  that  it  impacts  upon  the  protagonists’  way  of  being  and  drawing  meaning.  In  order  to  continue  living,  they  must  find  a  new  mode  of  conceiving  and  relating  to  place.  In  other  words,  we  find  that  the  encountering,  conceptualisation  and  mitigation  of  climate  change  means  we  must  reconfigure  our  epistemology  and  ontology.  Without  this  crucial  redefinition,  so  the  novel  suggests,  we  become  displaced  philosophically.      ‘Nothing  is  certain  and  everything  confused’:  Environmental  Apocalypse  and  the  Limits  of  Knowledge  in  Richard  Jefferies’  After  London  Adrian   Tait  (Independent  Scholar)      The  late  nineteenth  century  is  surprisingly  well  stocked  with  examples  of  utopian  fiction  in  which  the  protagonist  is  mysteriously  transported  from  imperfect  present  to  future  perfect.    In  Richard  Jefferies’  After  London  (1885),  however,  a  gilded  age  of  technological  artifice  –  of  ‘iron  chariots’  and  structures  ‘lifted  to  the  skies’  –  has  been  overtaken  by  an  unspecified  but  catastrophic  ‘event’,  the  capital  city  has  disappeared  beneath  a  poisonous  lake,  and,  amidst  the  confusion,  society  has  quickly  fallen  ‘into  barbarism’.    In  turn,  After  London  has  its  origin  in  ‘The  Great  Snow’,  an  unpublished  fragment  in  which  the  great  city  is  again  erased  by  environmental  apocalypse.    What  both  these  visions  have  in  common  –  apart  from  the  relish  with  which  they  dispatch  London  and  Londoners  –  is  their  refusal  to  explain  themselves.    By  any  sensible  definition,  therefore,  neither  should  be  included  in  the  category  of  ‘cli-­‐fi’,  or  fiction  about  climate  change;  yet  climate  change  is  itself  a  subject  whose  apparently  simple  outlines  have  been  clouded  by  uncertainty  (and  political  obfuscation),  and  to  which  our  responses  are,  it  seems,  hamstrung  by  doubts  about  the  effects  or  efficacy  of  almost  every  solution  bar  the  most  obvious  (reduce  emissions  of  greenhouse  gases).  In  short,  we  live  in  troubled  times,  overshadowed  by  risk  and  uncertainty;  and  in  that  context,  these  early  instances  of  fictional  environmental  apocalypse  resonate  with  our  own  anxieties  about  what  we  know,  or  prefer  not  to  know,  even  as  we  continue  to  assume  and  presume  so  much.    This  is,  perhaps,  an  important  reason  to  reconsider  Jefferies’  work:  at  the  very  moment  that  Western  civilisation  was  asserting  its  complete  mastery  of  the  environment,  Jefferies  insisted  on  ‘the  full  mystery  and  the  depth  of  things’  and,  by  extension,  their  fundamental  unknowability.    H4  Presenter  Biographies    Gregers  Andersen  is  a  Postdoctoral  Fellow  at  the  Department  of  Arts  and  Cultural  Studies  at  the  University  of  Copenhagen.  He  did  his  PhD  at  the  same  department  and  at  the  Rachel  

Carson  Center,  Ludwig-­‐Maximillians-­‐Universität,  Munich.  He  has  published  articles  in  several  Scandinavian  journals  and  has  recently  also  published  an  article  in  the  American  journal  Symplokē.  He  is  currently  working  on  turning  his  PhD  Dissertation,  “Climate  Changed  Existence  and  its  Worlds.  Global  Warming  in  Fiction  and  Philosophy”,  into  a  book  on  ‘climate  fiction’  (‘cli-­‐fi’)  i.e.  fictions  that  use  the  scientific  paradigm  of  anthropogenic  global  warming  in  their  plot.          Sophia  David  is  a  third  year  AHRC  funded  English  PhD  student  at  the  University  of  Exeter.  Her  thesis  examines  environmental  fiction  and  how  it  can  raise  consciousness  about  ecological  issues.  She  completed  an  MSc  in  Geography  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh  and  BA  in  English  Literature  at  Queen  Mary,  University  of  London.    She  previously  worked  as  a  Climate  campaigner  for  an  environmental  NGO.  In  January  2016,  Sophia  will  be  joining  the  Royal  Society  policy  team.      Adrian  Tate      H5:  The  Ecotheory  Criticism  Collective:  ‘The  Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner’  (University  of  Cambridge)    Presenters:    Srishti  Krishnamoorthy  (Faculty  of  English,  University  of    Cambridge/  Newnham  College)  is  a  second  year  doctoral  candidate  in    English  and  works  on  sexual  politics  and  botanical  poetics  in  avant    garde  poettry  by  women.    Dr  Drew  Milne  (Faculty  of  English,  University  of  Cambridge  /  Corpus  Christi)  is  the  Judith  E  Wilson  Lecturer  in  Drama  and  Poetry.    Dr.  Redell  Olsen’s  recent  publications  include,  Film  Poems  (Les  Figues,  2014)  and  Punk  Faun:  a  bar  rock  pastel  (Subpress  2012).  ).(Reader  in  Poetic  Practice  at  Royal  Holloway,  University  of  London).    Eva  Urban  is  Attachée  d'Enseignement  et  de  Recherche  at  the  English  Department,  Université  de  Rennes  2.  From  September  2012  until  August  2015,  she  was  a  British  Academy  Postdoctoral  Research  Fellow  at  the  Faculty  of  English,  University  of  Cambridge.  She  is  a  Postdoctoral  Associate  of  Clare  Hall,  Cambridge  and  an  Associate  of  the  Centre  d'Etudes  Irlandaises,  Université  de  Rennes  2.    H6  STORIES  OF  CHANGE  6:  Energy  transition  and  transformation    An  Energy  Account  for  Spaceship  Earth  Renata  Tyszczuk  (University  of  Sheffield)    Against  Capital  Energy:  Narratives  of  Social  Transformation  in  the  Work  of  Street  Farm  and  Brenda  Vale  and  Robert  Vale  Stephen  Hunt  (University  of  the  West  of  England)    The  Role  of  the  Eco-­‐Parable:  Stories  as  Frames  in  Climate  Change  Activism    Mary  Kristen  Layne  (University  of  Glasgow)    

Scientific  and  creative  writing  tend  to  be  presented  as  disparate  fields  of  writing.  However,  the  use  of  the  short,  instructive  narrative  (in  the  form  of  a  fable  or  case  study)  serves  to  provide  a  point  of  connection  between  obscure  concepts  and  personal  impacts.  In  environmental  literature  perhaps  the  most  famous  is  Rachel  Carson’s  opening  chapter  of  Silent  Spring,  “A  Fable  for  Tomorrow.”  Fables  such  as  this  are  memorable  and  accessible,  and  allow  for  the  dispersion  of  science  communication  across  differing  audiences.  In  facing  the  chief  environmental  crisis  of  our  time,  climate  change,  framing  the  crisis  in  the  form  of  a  narrative  is  essential  to  heighten  to  tangibility  of  the  crisis  at  hand.  Within  the  southern  United  States,  climate  change  denial  is  rampant;  engaging  the  (largely  Republican  and  Christian)  sceptic  demographic  is  essential  for  promoting  a  move  toward  sustainable  energy  in  the  U.S.  Utilising  the  rhetorical  frames  of  the  well-­‐known  New  Testament  parables  offers  a  creative,  effective  way  to  express  environmental  concerns  in  a  culturally  conscious  manner.  In  this  paper,  I  consider  the  environmental  narratives  at  work  in  religious  dogma  and  discourse  and,  conversely,  consider  the  religious  narratives  at  work  in  environmental  communication.  I  trace  the  use  of  religious  narratives  for  other  political  movements,  and  explore  the  contexts  in  which  such  narratives  are  effective  frames  for  environmental  communication.  Finally,  I  propose  how  re-­‐storying  religious  and  environmental  narratives  might  be  utilised  for  heightened  climate  change  engagement.      H6  Presenter  Biographies    Renata  Tyszczuk      Stephen  Hunt      Mary  Kristen  Layne