Dirt Theory and Material Ecocriticism

This essay speaks for dirty aesthetics. Although aesthetic landscapes readily inspire environmental thinking, a case can be made for grappling with the truly local dirty matter right at hand. Dirt, soil, earth, and dust surround us at all scales: we find them on our shoes, bodies, and computer screens, in fields and forests, and floating in the air. They are the stuff of geological structures, of the rocky Earth itself, and are mobile like our bodies

Agency in the Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, and the New Materialisms

Our current era has been termed the Age of the “Anthropocene,” or the human- inflected geological era. This essay addresses the implications of human impact on the Earth as a form of “radical reality” by addressing the broad spectrum of human and non-human agency. The analysis follows a three-step process: it begins with an introduction to the new materialisms and distributed agency in contrast to Howard Tuttle’s notion of “radical reality” based on human consciousness. It then explores the agency of nature’s “vibrancy” in the debate occurring early in the Anthropocene (during Goethe’s lifetime) between “vitalism” and “mechanism.” Finally, I use this context to explore Goethe’s optics as a view that, like the new materialisms, is grounded in the interactivity of human and non-human energies. I juxtapose Tuttle’s notion of radical reality with the new materialisms via Goethe in order to explore the broader implications of human and non-human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. Goethe offers convenient access into the Anthropocene with surprisingly prescient insights into what we now see as ecological enmeshments within nature’s systems

The Dark Pastoral: Goethe and Atwood

The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to find means of representing and analysing our fossil-fueled practices that have spread industrial particulates over the entire globe, changed the climate, and reshaped landscapes into a “new nature.” In this essay, I propose the “dark pastoral” as an analytical trope, examining two framing texts from the Anthropocene: Goethe’s landmark 1797 pastoral German epic, Hermann and Dorothea, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the first installment of her MaddAddam trilogy which ends with a surprisingly pastoral flourish. At the early phases of the Anthropocene (as it is defined by Paul Crutzen, at least), Goethe creates an epic pastoral whose materiality points darkly towards the impending modernity of capitalism. Atwood’s, postapocalyptic versions of a damaged yet rejuvenating Earth directly dramatise the Anthropocene’s destruction while ending with a “new” pastoral that relies on an almost total obliteration of humanity: these are dark pastoral visions

Unbalanced Nature, Unbounded Bodies, and Unlimited Technology: Ecocriticism and Karen Traviss’s Wess’har Series

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss’ provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her wess’har series with the guidance of two ecocritics who reject the concept of balanced nature, Dana Phillips and Ursula Heise. Additionally, I turn to the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood for insights regarding Traviss’ spurious yet rather standard vision of an unlimited technological panacea. Traviss’ series portrays how the boundaries and limits that we perceive as solid are often much less so than we believe, yet she also reveals—inadvertently, it seems—how easily we blindly ignore other, more solid limits

Editorial 13.2

Editorial 13.2Editorial 13.

The Dangerous Quest for Nature Narratives in Goethe’s \u3cem\u3eWerther\u3c/em\u3e: A Reading of the Ruptured Monologue and the Ruptured Body

Assessing Goethe\u27s narrative ruptures, this essay follows their trail in three directions: first through the editor\u27s sudden interruption of Werther producing the post-epistolary multiplicity of voices, second in the alterations Goethe made to the 1787 version of Werther that enhance the theme of rupture itself, and third along the fault-lines delineated in three exemplary letters of nature from Werther

Faust’s Mountains: An Ecocritical Reading of Goethe’s Tragedy and Science

Ecocriticism\u27s environmental perspective views human beings, bodies, and culture as participants in ecological interactions and exchanges with the rest of the energetic and material world, including both biotic and abiotic forms. This ecocritical essay assesses how Goethe portrays Faust\u27s mountain experiences in both part I and part II (1808, 1832) of the tragedy as engagements with physical matter rather than with spiritual inspiration. Indeed, by using ecocriticism to study Goethe\u27s science as the context for the play, we see that Faust\u27s many mountains are more than a setting; they actively destabilize his — and our — assumptions about “passive matter” and recontextualize human endeavors in their physical environment. Faust\u27s mountains inspire the desire to “ascend,” but they also offer a glimpse into the massive geological changes occurring through deep time even as they radically alter the climatic systems of the biosphere on a daily basis. In other words, scientists in the Age of Goethe recognized that the apparent solidity of mountains is actually a short-term illusion; mountains instead embody and enact climatic and geological flows in which we human beings are not the only active forces. Goethe\u27s Faust documents such issues, though this is often overlooked in readings celebrating human ingenuity and action as the supreme, spiritual, and/or modern force shaping our world for the “better,” regardless of so-called “collateral damage” such as murder, colonialism, piracy, and the final putrid swamp. In contrast, viewing the tragedy through ecocriticism and Goethe\u27s science offers a possible environmental stance acknowledging humanity\u27s position within these many physical processes rather than as transcendental beings who dominate at whim and without long-term costs