“The Lingering Scent of Invisible Lilacs”: An Ecopoetic Analysis of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way
Charlotte Vrielink, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Ecopoetics is a relatively new research discipline that studies the relations between literature and nature. However, unlike ecocriticism, it does not focus on ethical of political analyses of nature writings, but it sheds light on the more creative aspect of the writing of literature, such as vocabulary, style and text structure. This ecopoetic approach seems to be especially suited for French literature, for French nature writings do not often raise environmental awareness and are not set in extreme natural areas of “wilderness”, like some of their Anglo-American counterparts, and therefore require another perspective (Posthumus 2011). In this paper, I would like to apply the ecopoetic approach to one of the most illustrious novels of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913). This work has been studied in various ways, but never before in combination with an ecocritical or ecopoetic framework. I will show which ecopoetic perspectives, as formulated by Pierre Schoentjes in his work Ce qui a lieu (2015), can be retraced in Swann’s Way and therefore will use the concept of the rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari (especially the notion of “cartography”) and the idea of “weaving” by Jean-Pierre Richard to analyse the structural organisation of Swann’s way, which are constructed according to the same principles: non-linearity, non-hierarchy and interconnectedness. At sentence level, I will demonstrate how style and syntax evoke the various characteristics of the natural world in order to create a mimicry of nature, such as the idea of lilacs and the passing of time, the femmes-fleurs and the aquatic reflections which illustrate the narrator’s associative thoughts. All these subtle ways in which nature shapes the novel show that Marcel Proust is much more of an “eco-poet” than he may have seemed before.
Ecological Balance in Cultural Studies
John Un, Cornell University
The concept of alienation, the human tragedy, is present in all cultural theory. However, for all its expositions, we might say it is most rigorously understood with its negation. The animal is employed as the embodiment of alienation’s theoretical opposite, as harmonious and “one” with nature. However, oftentimes our conception of the animal is presumed, or presupposed. This paper explores the ambiguities of how the figure of the animal is unwittingly employed in criticism. In one sense, it is our supposed lack of animality that is responsible for our ecological crisis and, in another sense, it is precisely our distortion of animality which attests to uniquely human disasters. This ambiguity is instantiated throughout cultural studies, even in works that trouble the human/animal ontologies, such as in the digital humanities or gender studies. Fundamental to this problem is what we consider to be the animal, or natural. Extracting the notion of animal as balance, or an ecological equilibrium, from this tension allows us a certain insight into the animal as nature’s object with critical implications throughout cultural studies. Asserting the persistence of the notion of balance in theory prompts us to revisit the very notion of the, in a sense, “inhuman ontology” in our conception of the animal which reverberates throughout criticism.
Toxic Memories, Damaged Immunity, and Ecocide in Julio Hernández Cordón’s Polvo (Dust)
Aarón Lacayo, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Decades after various Central American countries officially ended their civil wars in the 1990s, the region continues to grapple with political violence, widespread migration and chronic poverty. Although growing scholarship examines how Central American literature confronts the legacies of war, scholars are only now beginning to examine how cinema has engaged with these repercussions of violence. Julio Hernández Cordón’s Guatemalan film, Polvo (Dust, 2012) explores the personal traumas of Juan, a young indigenous musician. The film follows Juan’s search for the remains of his father, who disappeared from their village during Guatemala’s Civil War (1960-1996). I argue that Polvo offers a radical way of grasping the nation’s violent past by dramatizing how a particular element—dust—participates in recurring cycles of violence by way of a body’s damaging autoimmune response. In Polvo, dust signals both personal illness and national traumas. Juan, who suffers from extremely debilitating migraines, is accompanied on his journey to the countryside by an allergy- suffering filmmaker who is making a documentary out of his story. Juan attempts suicide several times throughout Polvo and, in one pivotal scene, resorts to consuming fertilizer. Such particular act gestures toward a personal form of ecocide while simultaneously enacting a visual ecology of death in the context of Guatemala’s history. Dust also alludes to the disappeared victims and murdered corpses that remain unaccounted for in mass graves throughout the Mayan highlands. Thus, in Polvo, dust engages with both the human body and political history, becoming visible through its effects on the protagonists. As soil/earth, dust may stand in for the landscape itself as a damaged casualty of war that, like humans and animals, also experienced the ravages of armed conflict.
“Der Herr auch vergab allen seinen Feinden nicht”: The Infringement of Natural Law and Push towards Revolution in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Rebecca Jordan, University of Connecticut
Reaching nearly a century and an ocean apart, Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) initially appear to have little in common. The first text illustrates a fictionalized version of true events that forced a 16th-century German merchant to rise up and cause a rebellion against several lords, judges, and even the monarchy who he charged as corrupt. The latter text, the fictionalized retelling of Sinclair’s own experiences of the Chicago meatpacking industry, defines the immigrant’s struggle in a rising apathetic capitalistic society. What both texts consider is the push towards revolution due to the infringement on the property rights of the protagonists. Kohlhaas and Jurgis respectively have their livelihoods, land, and even families affected by the injustices caused by the ruling bodies. In my paper I argue, following closely John Locke’s theories on natural law and the rights to property, how the protagonists are forced into social alienation and rebellion as the only means of seeking justice and righting the wrongs committed against them.
The Difficulties in Overcoming Dualism: A Critique of Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture and an Ecofeminist Analysis of Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs
Kassi Burnett, The Ohio State University
My paper examines the difficulty that presents itself when attempting to argue on behalf of nature, in particular the way that anthropocentrism evolves and why this is problematic. Some examples of prominent splits I examine: the division between human and nature, human and animal, conscious and unconscious, mindful and unmindful, communicative and noncommunicative. The resistance of breaking out of dualism finds itself a home in the difficulty of advocation for women as well; it is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which one might advocate for women without referring to man and woman as defining categories. As a specific example, the paper looks to Monica Maron’s novel Stille Zeile Sechs (1993), and the difficulty of escaping dualism when discussing humans and nature: how this helps us to better understand the oppression and objectification of women and nature, how this is potentially harmful, and what we can learn and understand from such a reading.
Cultural Nationalism and the Environment in Merle Collins’s Lady in a Boat
Marta Werbanowska, Howard University
Theorists of the Caribbean have long conceptualized the region’s cultures in terms of environmental and topographical tropes. Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “nation language” and Édouard Glissant’s idea of “poetics of relation” both understand Caribbean cultural expression in relation to its spatial figuration, seeing the origins of the region’s poetic languages not only in its turbulent history but also in the impact of its natural environment. According to Glissant, landscape, rather than simply a background, has always been an active agent in the development of the region’s histories and, consequently, its communities and cultures. Brathwaite, in his study of African retentions as well as local idiosyncrasies in Anglophone Caribbean literatures, advocates for a language that would reflect both the history and the natural environment of the region. Drawing from the theories of Glissant and Brathwaite, this presentation reads the poems collected in Merle Collins’s 2003 Lady in a Boat as invocations of Grenadian history through a creolized poetic language that is rich in environmental imagery and saturated with local folklores and spiritualities. By evoking the trope of landscape as witness to history and agent of cultural and national identity formation, Collins ultimately furthers the Caribbean cultural nationalist discourse into the so-called “post-nationalist” era.
"M. Butterfly": Sexual Orientation and Postcolonialism
Xinglu Jiang, Duke University
This article probes into the sexually transformational and historically developmental play M. Butterfly composed by a Chinese American writer David Henry Hwang. It also involves the adapted movie M. Butterfly by David Cronenberg, as well as the truly historical event between a Chinese spy and a French diplomat, based on which Hwang accomplishes his play. The three dimensions complicate and compound the term “M. Butterfly” by proceeding to investigate on postcolonialism as the historical backdrop: 1) why sexual orientation is unnatural and is instead oppressively constructed by culture and society; 2) how stereotyped racism is reflected, molded and manipulated by gender discourses; 3) how a nation – China as representative of the colonized Oriental and France the colonial Western - has been “gendered”, “transgendered”; and 4) how the play performs a dialectic conversation with Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly which implicates relationship between Japan and the United States, thus developing a private erotic scandal into a global debate on postcolonialism. To put it in a nutshell, the political, historical, social event happened between two individuals from China and France has transmuted from a heterosexual/homosexual affair into an international political crime, which substantiates the literary play by endowing it with a historically political metonymy. Therefore, the discovery of “M. Butterfly’s” being not a woman but a man is not only the reverse process of racial castration, but also the reverse process of political castration echoing to and reifies the reorder of political powers in the postcolonial era.
An Ecocritical Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men
Ashley Garver, University of Nevada-Reno
This paper examines the relationship between immigration and the environment in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men. Kingston’s text explores the interchange between the immigrant as a subject and nature as a location revealing a complex relationship between the Chinese immigrant and the American landscape. Working as laborers, the Chinese immigrants in the novel participate in the destruction of the environment, but they also demonstrate a strong sense of empathy with the land they are destroying. I argue that the simultaneous exploitation of the land and the laborers speaks to a political relationship with nature not often addressed in the field of ecocriticism and suggest that critics should begin shifting their gaze to a more diverse body of literature in order to more fully understand how relationships with the natural world are cultivated and sustained.
The Environmental Costs of Nation-Building in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle (1884)
Emily Sieg, Georgetown University
Published within the context of nation-building efforts in Imperial Germany, Wilhelm Raabe’s novel, Pfisters Mühle (1884), presents an ecocritical response to the destructive process of industrialization that accompanied rapid social and economic upheaval during the late nineteenth century. With wit, irony and a degree of resignation, the novel gives voice to the emotional reservations of the young protagonist, Eberhard Pfister, as he negotiates the loss of his pastoral home in this diary-as-novel. Drawing on the ideas of historian David Blackbourn, who posits that the “taming” of the German landscape was in many ways about the making of modern Germany, this research investigates how descriptions of the polluted countryside in Pfisters Mühle speak to sociopolitical issues of a nation in the making. The natural environment, an ever present witness to this transition, represents not only some of the most explicit olfactory and visual costs, but also manifests the sheer magnitude of the upheaval taking place. As the waters across the nation fill with slime and the fish turn belly up, individuals must come to terms with this new reality, as they are just as powerless to restore the pristine waters as to reverse the drive of industrialization. Yet this bleak image does not fuel outright resentment or regret, as Eberhard’s voice guides the reader through an acceptance of loss and a sober, albeit melancholic, embrace of the future. Even as the negative ecological and social costs of industrialization alter the face of Germany’s once idyllic landscape and forcibly strip away elements of society that appear unable to adapt, Eberhard places a resigned faith in the presumed end of these means, namely the nation-state of Imperial Germany, to balance out the costs and benefits of this nauseating transformation.
Animal Speaks for the Human-Animal: Posthumanist Significance of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)
Gayathri Goel, Tufts University
Since Donna Haraway’s controversial essay, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in 1983, Posthumanist Theory has gained importance because of the myriad ways in which it interrogates essentialist identities. The theory offers crucial interventions in traditional conceptions of “human,” and I would go so far as to say that, it shakes up ontologies previous taken for granted. Such a theoretical refiguration has particular relevance in Animal Studies in deconstructing the privileged categorization of “human” as opposed to the “animal.” However, although we now envision the human-animal as a continuum of the non-human-animal, we cannot deny the violence and destruction that humans routinely propagate in the animal world. How, then, do we reconcile the theory with the reality? In my paper, I examine the human/animal entanglement in Indra Sinha’s novel, Animal’s People (2007). The novel is set in India and is framed by the world’s worst industrial disaster—the Bhopal gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984. The novel is narrated by a 19-year old victim, known simply as Animal, who grows up with a permanent deformity that forces him to walk on all fours. Through Animal’s perspective, the novel addresses the widespread impact of the ecological disaster perpetrated by a global corporation that efficiently hides behind legalities. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming animal,” I argue that Animal’s liminal identity, which evolves out of the simultaneous animalization and dehumanization he experiences, allows him to challenge the violence of global capitalism in unique ways. Through his dual identity, Animal speaks both as an animal and a human, and demands an acknowledgement of the devastation that has been wreaked upon local ecology. Thus, this paper makes important linkages between Posthumanism and Global Ecocriticism that, so far, have not been fully established or explored in material ways.
L’homme que donc je suis: Animal Discourse in Montaigne’s Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde
Elizabeth Kirby, New York University
In the Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde, Montaigne narrates the internal discours of a dog following his master: “en ce chien-là, un tel discours se passe: J’ai suivi jusqu’à ce carrefour mon maître à la trace, il faut nécessairement qu’il passe par un de ces trois chemins.” Montaigne throws his readers into the dog’s perspective, yet at the same time warns us that this is an imperfect approximation of the dog’s reasoning – it is a translation of the dog’s discourse (“un tel discours se passe”). As Montaigne follows the dog’s discours, the dog follows – and imagines – the hypothetical discours of his master, so that both animal and human follow each other’s discours in an almost Derridean hunt. The dog is before and behind the human in Montaigne’s very syntax. In my paper I propose to examine the ways in which Montaigne grafts his own human thinking onto the otherness of the animal in order to translate animal discours into human language. Animal discours ultimately evade Montaigne’s human translation, yet his attempts to approximate their thinking seem to strengthen his awareness of the boundaries of his own perception and understanding. The apparent otherness of the animal helps Montaigne to see himself and helps him to doubt the extent to which human senses and human language can capture their environment.
Sounding the Heterotopic Colonial Soundscapes in Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano
Cae Joseph-Masséna, University of Maryland-College Park
In 1957, a year which also marks Duvalier’s access to power in Haiti, Marie Chauvet, now considered one of Haiti’s most prominent writers, released her second novel Dance on the Volcano. Set in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Saint Domingue era, the novel is a fictional account of the lives of performers Minette, and her sister Lise, two young affranchies singers. Chauvet’s novel is based on the work of historian Jean Fouchard on the sisters who, between 1780 and 1789, became acclaimed artists in the thriving Saint-Domingue theater scene, despite the racial segregation barring most artists of African descent from its stages. Her novel was published at a critical moment of heightened tension where numerous authors and political figures in Haiti wrote conflicting narratives of the Haitian Revolution.
During this presentation on Marie Vieux Chauvet’s novel, I propose to tune in to the soundscapes provided by the author. In Dance on the Volcano, Chauvet tellingly recasts the overwhelming male hero narratives of the Haitian Revolution, to center her novel on Minette not only as a proficient performer but a revolutionary activist. In this presentation, I consider the implications of Chauvet’s narrative turn by envisioning it as a way to challenge the silencing of women of African descent’s role in the Revolution. By committing to hearing the written word, or reading sound, in Chauvet’s book, I methodologically enlist notions of mixtures, and question textual and spatial boundaries. I envision Chauvet’s novel as a soundscape voices of women from African descent of the era.
Charlotte Vrielink, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Ecopoetics is a relatively new research discipline that studies the relations between literature and nature. However, unlike ecocriticism, it does not focus on ethical of political analyses of nature writings, but it sheds light on the more creative aspect of the writing of literature, such as vocabulary, style and text structure. This ecopoetic approach seems to be especially suited for French literature, for French nature writings do not often raise environmental awareness and are not set in extreme natural areas of “wilderness”, like some of their Anglo-American counterparts, and therefore require another perspective (Posthumus 2011). In this paper, I would like to apply the ecopoetic approach to one of the most illustrious novels of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913). This work has been studied in various ways, but never before in combination with an ecocritical or ecopoetic framework. I will show which ecopoetic perspectives, as formulated by Pierre Schoentjes in his work Ce qui a lieu (2015), can be retraced in Swann’s Way and therefore will use the concept of the rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari (especially the notion of “cartography”) and the idea of “weaving” by Jean-Pierre Richard to analyse the structural organisation of Swann’s way, which are constructed according to the same principles: non-linearity, non-hierarchy and interconnectedness. At sentence level, I will demonstrate how style and syntax evoke the various characteristics of the natural world in order to create a mimicry of nature, such as the idea of lilacs and the passing of time, the femmes-fleurs and the aquatic reflections which illustrate the narrator’s associative thoughts. All these subtle ways in which nature shapes the novel show that Marcel Proust is much more of an “eco-poet” than he may have seemed before.
Ecological Balance in Cultural Studies
John Un, Cornell University
The concept of alienation, the human tragedy, is present in all cultural theory. However, for all its expositions, we might say it is most rigorously understood with its negation. The animal is employed as the embodiment of alienation’s theoretical opposite, as harmonious and “one” with nature. However, oftentimes our conception of the animal is presumed, or presupposed. This paper explores the ambiguities of how the figure of the animal is unwittingly employed in criticism. In one sense, it is our supposed lack of animality that is responsible for our ecological crisis and, in another sense, it is precisely our distortion of animality which attests to uniquely human disasters. This ambiguity is instantiated throughout cultural studies, even in works that trouble the human/animal ontologies, such as in the digital humanities or gender studies. Fundamental to this problem is what we consider to be the animal, or natural. Extracting the notion of animal as balance, or an ecological equilibrium, from this tension allows us a certain insight into the animal as nature’s object with critical implications throughout cultural studies. Asserting the persistence of the notion of balance in theory prompts us to revisit the very notion of the, in a sense, “inhuman ontology” in our conception of the animal which reverberates throughout criticism.
Toxic Memories, Damaged Immunity, and Ecocide in Julio Hernández Cordón’s Polvo (Dust)
Aarón Lacayo, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Decades after various Central American countries officially ended their civil wars in the 1990s, the region continues to grapple with political violence, widespread migration and chronic poverty. Although growing scholarship examines how Central American literature confronts the legacies of war, scholars are only now beginning to examine how cinema has engaged with these repercussions of violence. Julio Hernández Cordón’s Guatemalan film, Polvo (Dust, 2012) explores the personal traumas of Juan, a young indigenous musician. The film follows Juan’s search for the remains of his father, who disappeared from their village during Guatemala’s Civil War (1960-1996). I argue that Polvo offers a radical way of grasping the nation’s violent past by dramatizing how a particular element—dust—participates in recurring cycles of violence by way of a body’s damaging autoimmune response. In Polvo, dust signals both personal illness and national traumas. Juan, who suffers from extremely debilitating migraines, is accompanied on his journey to the countryside by an allergy- suffering filmmaker who is making a documentary out of his story. Juan attempts suicide several times throughout Polvo and, in one pivotal scene, resorts to consuming fertilizer. Such particular act gestures toward a personal form of ecocide while simultaneously enacting a visual ecology of death in the context of Guatemala’s history. Dust also alludes to the disappeared victims and murdered corpses that remain unaccounted for in mass graves throughout the Mayan highlands. Thus, in Polvo, dust engages with both the human body and political history, becoming visible through its effects on the protagonists. As soil/earth, dust may stand in for the landscape itself as a damaged casualty of war that, like humans and animals, also experienced the ravages of armed conflict.
“Der Herr auch vergab allen seinen Feinden nicht”: The Infringement of Natural Law and Push towards Revolution in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Rebecca Jordan, University of Connecticut
Reaching nearly a century and an ocean apart, Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) initially appear to have little in common. The first text illustrates a fictionalized version of true events that forced a 16th-century German merchant to rise up and cause a rebellion against several lords, judges, and even the monarchy who he charged as corrupt. The latter text, the fictionalized retelling of Sinclair’s own experiences of the Chicago meatpacking industry, defines the immigrant’s struggle in a rising apathetic capitalistic society. What both texts consider is the push towards revolution due to the infringement on the property rights of the protagonists. Kohlhaas and Jurgis respectively have their livelihoods, land, and even families affected by the injustices caused by the ruling bodies. In my paper I argue, following closely John Locke’s theories on natural law and the rights to property, how the protagonists are forced into social alienation and rebellion as the only means of seeking justice and righting the wrongs committed against them.
The Difficulties in Overcoming Dualism: A Critique of Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture and an Ecofeminist Analysis of Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs
Kassi Burnett, The Ohio State University
My paper examines the difficulty that presents itself when attempting to argue on behalf of nature, in particular the way that anthropocentrism evolves and why this is problematic. Some examples of prominent splits I examine: the division between human and nature, human and animal, conscious and unconscious, mindful and unmindful, communicative and noncommunicative. The resistance of breaking out of dualism finds itself a home in the difficulty of advocation for women as well; it is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which one might advocate for women without referring to man and woman as defining categories. As a specific example, the paper looks to Monica Maron’s novel Stille Zeile Sechs (1993), and the difficulty of escaping dualism when discussing humans and nature: how this helps us to better understand the oppression and objectification of women and nature, how this is potentially harmful, and what we can learn and understand from such a reading.
Cultural Nationalism and the Environment in Merle Collins’s Lady in a Boat
Marta Werbanowska, Howard University
Theorists of the Caribbean have long conceptualized the region’s cultures in terms of environmental and topographical tropes. Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “nation language” and Édouard Glissant’s idea of “poetics of relation” both understand Caribbean cultural expression in relation to its spatial figuration, seeing the origins of the region’s poetic languages not only in its turbulent history but also in the impact of its natural environment. According to Glissant, landscape, rather than simply a background, has always been an active agent in the development of the region’s histories and, consequently, its communities and cultures. Brathwaite, in his study of African retentions as well as local idiosyncrasies in Anglophone Caribbean literatures, advocates for a language that would reflect both the history and the natural environment of the region. Drawing from the theories of Glissant and Brathwaite, this presentation reads the poems collected in Merle Collins’s 2003 Lady in a Boat as invocations of Grenadian history through a creolized poetic language that is rich in environmental imagery and saturated with local folklores and spiritualities. By evoking the trope of landscape as witness to history and agent of cultural and national identity formation, Collins ultimately furthers the Caribbean cultural nationalist discourse into the so-called “post-nationalist” era.
"M. Butterfly": Sexual Orientation and Postcolonialism
Xinglu Jiang, Duke University
This article probes into the sexually transformational and historically developmental play M. Butterfly composed by a Chinese American writer David Henry Hwang. It also involves the adapted movie M. Butterfly by David Cronenberg, as well as the truly historical event between a Chinese spy and a French diplomat, based on which Hwang accomplishes his play. The three dimensions complicate and compound the term “M. Butterfly” by proceeding to investigate on postcolonialism as the historical backdrop: 1) why sexual orientation is unnatural and is instead oppressively constructed by culture and society; 2) how stereotyped racism is reflected, molded and manipulated by gender discourses; 3) how a nation – China as representative of the colonized Oriental and France the colonial Western - has been “gendered”, “transgendered”; and 4) how the play performs a dialectic conversation with Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly which implicates relationship between Japan and the United States, thus developing a private erotic scandal into a global debate on postcolonialism. To put it in a nutshell, the political, historical, social event happened between two individuals from China and France has transmuted from a heterosexual/homosexual affair into an international political crime, which substantiates the literary play by endowing it with a historically political metonymy. Therefore, the discovery of “M. Butterfly’s” being not a woman but a man is not only the reverse process of racial castration, but also the reverse process of political castration echoing to and reifies the reorder of political powers in the postcolonial era.
An Ecocritical Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men
Ashley Garver, University of Nevada-Reno
This paper examines the relationship between immigration and the environment in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men. Kingston’s text explores the interchange between the immigrant as a subject and nature as a location revealing a complex relationship between the Chinese immigrant and the American landscape. Working as laborers, the Chinese immigrants in the novel participate in the destruction of the environment, but they also demonstrate a strong sense of empathy with the land they are destroying. I argue that the simultaneous exploitation of the land and the laborers speaks to a political relationship with nature not often addressed in the field of ecocriticism and suggest that critics should begin shifting their gaze to a more diverse body of literature in order to more fully understand how relationships with the natural world are cultivated and sustained.
The Environmental Costs of Nation-Building in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle (1884)
Emily Sieg, Georgetown University
Published within the context of nation-building efforts in Imperial Germany, Wilhelm Raabe’s novel, Pfisters Mühle (1884), presents an ecocritical response to the destructive process of industrialization that accompanied rapid social and economic upheaval during the late nineteenth century. With wit, irony and a degree of resignation, the novel gives voice to the emotional reservations of the young protagonist, Eberhard Pfister, as he negotiates the loss of his pastoral home in this diary-as-novel. Drawing on the ideas of historian David Blackbourn, who posits that the “taming” of the German landscape was in many ways about the making of modern Germany, this research investigates how descriptions of the polluted countryside in Pfisters Mühle speak to sociopolitical issues of a nation in the making. The natural environment, an ever present witness to this transition, represents not only some of the most explicit olfactory and visual costs, but also manifests the sheer magnitude of the upheaval taking place. As the waters across the nation fill with slime and the fish turn belly up, individuals must come to terms with this new reality, as they are just as powerless to restore the pristine waters as to reverse the drive of industrialization. Yet this bleak image does not fuel outright resentment or regret, as Eberhard’s voice guides the reader through an acceptance of loss and a sober, albeit melancholic, embrace of the future. Even as the negative ecological and social costs of industrialization alter the face of Germany’s once idyllic landscape and forcibly strip away elements of society that appear unable to adapt, Eberhard places a resigned faith in the presumed end of these means, namely the nation-state of Imperial Germany, to balance out the costs and benefits of this nauseating transformation.
Animal Speaks for the Human-Animal: Posthumanist Significance of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)
Gayathri Goel, Tufts University
Since Donna Haraway’s controversial essay, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in 1983, Posthumanist Theory has gained importance because of the myriad ways in which it interrogates essentialist identities. The theory offers crucial interventions in traditional conceptions of “human,” and I would go so far as to say that, it shakes up ontologies previous taken for granted. Such a theoretical refiguration has particular relevance in Animal Studies in deconstructing the privileged categorization of “human” as opposed to the “animal.” However, although we now envision the human-animal as a continuum of the non-human-animal, we cannot deny the violence and destruction that humans routinely propagate in the animal world. How, then, do we reconcile the theory with the reality? In my paper, I examine the human/animal entanglement in Indra Sinha’s novel, Animal’s People (2007). The novel is set in India and is framed by the world’s worst industrial disaster—the Bhopal gas leak from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984. The novel is narrated by a 19-year old victim, known simply as Animal, who grows up with a permanent deformity that forces him to walk on all fours. Through Animal’s perspective, the novel addresses the widespread impact of the ecological disaster perpetrated by a global corporation that efficiently hides behind legalities. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “becoming animal,” I argue that Animal’s liminal identity, which evolves out of the simultaneous animalization and dehumanization he experiences, allows him to challenge the violence of global capitalism in unique ways. Through his dual identity, Animal speaks both as an animal and a human, and demands an acknowledgement of the devastation that has been wreaked upon local ecology. Thus, this paper makes important linkages between Posthumanism and Global Ecocriticism that, so far, have not been fully established or explored in material ways.
L’homme que donc je suis: Animal Discourse in Montaigne’s Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde
Elizabeth Kirby, New York University
In the Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde, Montaigne narrates the internal discours of a dog following his master: “en ce chien-là, un tel discours se passe: J’ai suivi jusqu’à ce carrefour mon maître à la trace, il faut nécessairement qu’il passe par un de ces trois chemins.” Montaigne throws his readers into the dog’s perspective, yet at the same time warns us that this is an imperfect approximation of the dog’s reasoning – it is a translation of the dog’s discourse (“un tel discours se passe”). As Montaigne follows the dog’s discours, the dog follows – and imagines – the hypothetical discours of his master, so that both animal and human follow each other’s discours in an almost Derridean hunt. The dog is before and behind the human in Montaigne’s very syntax. In my paper I propose to examine the ways in which Montaigne grafts his own human thinking onto the otherness of the animal in order to translate animal discours into human language. Animal discours ultimately evade Montaigne’s human translation, yet his attempts to approximate their thinking seem to strengthen his awareness of the boundaries of his own perception and understanding. The apparent otherness of the animal helps Montaigne to see himself and helps him to doubt the extent to which human senses and human language can capture their environment.
Sounding the Heterotopic Colonial Soundscapes in Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano
Cae Joseph-Masséna, University of Maryland-College Park
In 1957, a year which also marks Duvalier’s access to power in Haiti, Marie Chauvet, now considered one of Haiti’s most prominent writers, released her second novel Dance on the Volcano. Set in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Saint Domingue era, the novel is a fictional account of the lives of performers Minette, and her sister Lise, two young affranchies singers. Chauvet’s novel is based on the work of historian Jean Fouchard on the sisters who, between 1780 and 1789, became acclaimed artists in the thriving Saint-Domingue theater scene, despite the racial segregation barring most artists of African descent from its stages. Her novel was published at a critical moment of heightened tension where numerous authors and political figures in Haiti wrote conflicting narratives of the Haitian Revolution.
During this presentation on Marie Vieux Chauvet’s novel, I propose to tune in to the soundscapes provided by the author. In Dance on the Volcano, Chauvet tellingly recasts the overwhelming male hero narratives of the Haitian Revolution, to center her novel on Minette not only as a proficient performer but a revolutionary activist. In this presentation, I consider the implications of Chauvet’s narrative turn by envisioning it as a way to challenge the silencing of women of African descent’s role in the Revolution. By committing to hearing the written word, or reading sound, in Chauvet’s book, I methodologically enlist notions of mixtures, and question textual and spatial boundaries. I envision Chauvet’s novel as a soundscape voices of women from African descent of the era.