‘Like a Stone’: Ecology, Enargeia, and Ethical Time in Alice Oswald’s Memorial

This article argues that the Anthropocene is marked by haunted time. As the ‘geological agents’ of climate change, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has put it, we both identify with ‘deep time’ processes and conjure the ghosts of those whose lives to come will be shaped in drastic ways by our actions in the present. This article explores a poetics of haunted time via readings of the work of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald. Halperin’s recent work with the “slow and fast time” of geological processes (calcification and lava flows), and also with the body’s own capacity to generate geologic material (in the form of body stones),engages with the possibility of “geologic intimacy.” From here, the article reads Memorial, Oswald’s recent translation of the Iliad pared down to snapshot biographies of the soldiers killed in the Trojan wars interleaved with a series of astonishing similes of the natural world, as an example of a poetics of haunted time. Drawing on James Hatley’s theory of ethical time and its ecocritical application by Deborah Bird Rose, I argue that Oswald’s strategy of repeating similes creates a kind of spectral echo, giving expression to an enfolding of diachronic and synchronous time in which intergenerational responsibilities are realised. The haunted time of Oswald’s poem thus represents a passage to the difficult intimacy of rethinking the relationship between past, present, and future actions and effects

Toxic pastoral:Comic failure and ironic nostalgia in contemporary British environmental theatre

In what follows, I will read two recent versions of the pastoral—Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) and Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)—as examples of the vitality which literary comic modes can offer to thinking about ecological dilemmas. Both invert and frustrate the conventional pastoral movement, wherein the equalising effects of release, reconciliation, and return are not realised. Rather, each play subjects the pastoral mode to actual or threatened displacement—in Eccleshare’s play the forest invades the city, whereas Butterworth dramatizes the efforts of civic authority to evict the green man from his wood—and makes this failure the basis of its exploration of the possibilities available in an eco-comic mode; finally, via the presentation of toxicity as a trope to, as Buell puts it, “unsettle[…] received assumptions about the boundaries of nature writing and environmental representation”, each play represents a version of pastoral that is alert and able to give form to the ironies, anxieties, and absurdities that inhere in contemporary environmental discourse

Animal detectives and ‘Anthropocene noir’ in Chloe Hooper’s A child’s book of true crime

In a recent lecture, Deborah Bird Rose posited the emergence of ‘Anthropocene noir’, a reality in which ‘we, human beings, are all criminals, all detectives, and all victims.’ In the Anthropocene there is no single body, culprit, scene or event which definitively identifies the ‘crime’ of the current extinction crisis. Delocalised in its causes, incalculable and potentially irredeemable in its effects, this crisis is a compelling example of what Ulrich Beck calls global risks, anticipated catastrophes which cannot be delimited spatially, temporally or socially. Via a reading of Chloe Hooper’s novel A Child’s Book of True Crime as an instance of ironic crime fiction which characterises ecological crimes as at the same time incalculable and urgently in need of recognition, this paper will examine what sort of crime fiction can account for the nature of ecological transgression and its detection in Beck’s world risk society, in which the time and scene of the crime cannot be limited to a particular moment or location

Toxic pastoral:Comic failure and ironic nostalgia in contemporary British environmental theatre

This article examines the enduring relevance of the pastoral mode and its potential to offer constructive critique of contemporary modes of thinking, writing about, and occupying those spaces marked off as pastoral. In an era characterised by potentially insoluble environmental crises, there is doubt over the relevance of a literary form which promises harmony and prioritises the status quo. However, I argue that two recent versions of the pastoral—Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) and Thomas Eccleshare’s Pastoral (2013)—provide examples of the vitality which literary comic modes can offer to thinking about ecological dilemmas. Both invert and frustrate the conventional pastoral movement, wherein the equalising effects of release, reconciliation, and return are not realised; and subjects the pastoral mode to actual or threatened displacement—in Eccleshare’s play the forest invades the city, whereas Butterworth dramatizes the efforts of civic authority to evict the green man from his wood—making this failure the basis of its exploration of the possibilities available in an eco-comic mode; finally, in contrast to Terry Gifford’s concept of post-pastoral which makes awe its main affective mode, Eccleshare and Butterworth present what I call toxic pastoral: versions of pastoral in which former certainties are degraded, permitting an engagement with and celebration of the ambivalence in human interactions with the more-than-human world. Each play represents a version of pastoral that is alert and able to give form to the ironies, anxieties, and absurdities that inhere in contemporary environmental discourse