Other News

1. CFPs

EARTH\'S BODY: AN ECOPOETRY ANTHOLOGY

Coeditors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street solicit submissions for an international anthology of ecopoetry. We are looking for a wide and varied array of submissions. Our working definition of "ecopoetry" is flexible; it includes not only what might be called nature poetry, and not only poetry that focuses on environmental issues, but also experimental poetry--poetry that explores language in its relations with the other-than-human. We welcome work by emerging as well as established poets. We welcome serious poems, playful poems, poems in open or traditional forms. Depending on limitations of space, we will consider not only short poems but also poems of several pages. The anthology will include only living poets or poets who were alive as of July 2007, and will include only poems either written in English or already translated into English; for poems not written in English, both the original and the translation must be submitted, and if accepted, both will be published. We will consider work that has been previously published. The poet (and/or translator) must control the copyright to the work.

The deadline for submissions is DECEMBER 15, 2008. Please send up to six poems to BOTH Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. You may send them as email text or by snail mail. If they come as email text, make sure the spacing and lineation travel accurately. WE WILL NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS. Please also include a short bio and a cover letter, and an SASE for our reply.

Ann Fisher-Wirth
English Department
Bondurant C-135
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
afwirth(at)olemiss.edu (replace (at) with @)

Laura-Gray Street
Department of English
2500 Rivermont Ave.
Randolph College
Lynchburg, VA 24503
lstreet(at)randolphcollege.edu (replace (at) with @)

2. CULTURES OF SUSTAINABILITY. Symposium and publication

A ONE-DAY SYMPOSIUM ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2008, AT STOREY HALL, RMIT UNIVERSITY, Melbourne, Australia. This symposium will examine how global environmental change is being addressed in the fields of Contemporary Art, Design, Literature, Ecocriticism & Cultural Theory, Media & Communications, and Philosophy.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Dr Wendy Wheeler, Reader in English, Department of Humanities Arts and Languages, London Metropolitan University, who will speak on biosemiotics. Wendy Wheeler’s latest book The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (2006) is published by Lawrence & Wishart, London.

If you would like to present a paper, please send your Abstract (max. 150 words) by July 11th to Dr Linda Williams linda.williams@rmit.edu.au. Abstracts for papers on literature should be sent to the president of ASLE-ANZ, Assoc. Prof. Kate Rigby kate.rigby@arts.monash.edu.au.

Selected papers will be published in themed issues of two peer-reviewed journals
Communication, Politics & Culture & PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature.

This symposium is a project of the Art & Sustainability Research Cluster, RMIT University. The organisers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Design Research Institute, RMIT University, RMIT Gallery, RMIT University Foundation and ALEANZ (The Association for the study of Literature & Environment Australia & New Zealand).

3. THE BIG GREEN ISSUE Modern Poetry in Translation (Third Series, Number 10) Publication Date: October 2008 We have borrowed the earth from our children. Good writing, world-wide, may help us return it to them in better shape.

We want poetry, translated and original, essays, anecdotes, photographs, illustrations, all of the highest quality, treating, in whatever ways, the beauty, abundance and plight of Mother Earth. This autumn MPT will be truly internationalist. We want work from all quarters, out of as many languages as possible, to demonstrate an obvious fact: on Planet Earth we sink or swim together. We want the issue to be polemical, saying the things that must be said, but also celebratory, so that we see, yet again, what it is we risk losing. We want writing that will show up wrong attitudes and the deeds they encourage; but also indicate how we might live better in the living world. We borrow the Earth from our children. Good writing, world-wide, may help us return it to them in better shape.

Submissions should be sent by 1 August 2008, please, in hard copy, with return postage, to The Editors, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Queen’s College, Oxford, OX1 4AW. Unless agreed in advance, submissions by email will not be accepted. Only very exceptionally will we consider work that has already been published elsewhere. Translators are themselves responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions. Since we do sometimes authorize further publication on one or two very reputable websites of work that has appeared in MPT, the permissions should cover that possibility. Submissions deadline 1^st August 2008www.mptmagazine.com

2. Reports on conferences

1. The conference Literature,Culture, Environment: Positioning ‘Ecocriticism’ was held at the University of Münster in March 2004. The idea had been originally floated at a meeting of interested persons convened by Hannes Bergthaller in Bonn in Spring 2003, after discussions at the ASLE (UK) conference in Bretton Hall the previous Autumn. Conference organisers were Sylvia Mayer (Münster), Catrin Gersdorf (Leipzig) and Colin Riordan (Newcastle). Keynote lectures were delivered by Hubert Zapf (Augsburg), who spoke on the notion of literature as cultural ecology, by Louise Westling (Eugene, Oregon) on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the question of posthumanism, and by Axel Goodbdy (Bath), who sketched out an ecocritical framework for the reading of contemporary German literature. On the last evening of the conference, Gaby Schwab and Simon Ortiz read from their current collaborative project, “The Ecologies of Traumatic Histories: Land, Loss, History, Time.”

About half the approximately 70 delegates at the conference were German or German-speaking (i.e. Austrian or Swiss), and many of them work in American Studies. The largest other single group was of people from the UK working in German Studies. There were also papers from the US, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy and Estonia, in a range of disciplines. The European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment was formally founded at the conference.

2. Report on the 2004 ASLE-UK biannual conference at University College Chichester, West Sussex, July 16-18, by Terry Gifford

From the pagan’s fire-circles at the Bronze Age barrows on the ridge of the South Downs we could look down and see that Chichester was sitting on the first solid ground at the end of a finger of water from a hand-shaped estuary. Conference members from North America, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Europe were on a field-trip to Europe’s largest remaining yew forest, guided by the warden from English Nature responsible for its management. Should the pagans be banned? Should the deer be controlled? Should this sacred place be managed for people or for nature? Should this be an ecocentric or anthropocentric management? Aren’t humans the problem? Is nature a cultural project? Why did some of us sneak off to find the green man in a low roof boss of Chichester cathedral? And what are the cultural meanings of a garden shed that we were each apparently carrying with us? This was a conference of conversations in which a question from a poet/employee of English Nature could be given the space to spawn further questions. And Shedman (www.shedman.net) interviewed us in his shed about the sheds in our lives for a video report at the end of the conference.

The theme of this conference was ‘Cross-Fertilisations: Literature, Science, and Nature’ and sharpening our thinking about this was the challenge of Dana Phillips’ recent bookThe Truth of Ecology, together with Michael P. Cohen’s critique of American ecocriticism in Environmental History No 9 January 2004, pp.1-36. One of the key questions to which discussion returned was that of which version of science (evolutionary sociobiology or complexity theory?) and which metaphors for ecology (web or soup? Systems theory or chaos theory?) are most convincing, or indeed, most useful, to our work in the humanities. Joseph Carroll, as the opening plenary speaker, made the case for a genetically evolved human nature, whilst papers by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University) and Karl Zuelke (College of Mount St. Joseph, Ohio) argued for a more complex systems theory.

Another issue resurfacing throughout the conference concerned the tension between the individual and the social modes of engagement with the environmental crisis. Is individual nature writing enough? Why is a ‘green’ mode of living not considered ‘normal’ now? In our focus on literature are we missing the opportunity to engage and critique more influential media? Are our representations of apocalypse undermined by paradoxes we fail to confront? The final plenary from Greg Garrard, Chair of ASLE UK, in which the latter question was addressed led to an interesting discussion of further questions: Is it helpful to suggest that nature is culture? Does it make sense to argue that culture is nature? Should we distinguish between positive and negative technologies, or their applications? Are ‘harmony’ and ‘sustainability’ concepts that we want to jettison? ‘Are we neglecting the spiritual basis of our concerns and our connectedness?’ asked a lone voice towards the end of the conference.

Many of these questions were touched upon indirectly in poetry readings from two Scottish poets, John Burnside and David Craig, Chris Agee from Ireland and Chichester’s own Vicky Feaver. The editor of the journalPlanet: The Welsh Internationalist, John Barnie, began his reflections on changing environments and culture with a photograph taken from space at night showing light pollution in Europe, which prompted John Parham to point out that our discussions had been neglecting a huge dark area of nature, the sea. Professor in Fine Art at Chichester, Shirley Chubb, gave us an insight into her exhibition that engages with Darwin’s process of walking and thinking between his garden path and his study. Indeed, the imagination with which Hugh Dunkerley had constructed this conference ensured that we used all of our faculties in our appreciation of the issues the conference raised. It really did feel that ecocriticism had emerged from its necessarily narrow beginnings to robustly debate the issues now opening before it in a manner that could converse beyond the dogmatisms of literary and cultural theory of the last two decades. In no small part this was due to the friendly, open and enquiring spirit that Hugh Dunkerley had managed to sustain at this conference. Towards the end of the conference Hugh had allowed me to present, not a paper, but a series of questions for Michael Cohen which we opened up to the audience. This created a space in which we could all address many of the questions that had been circling in our heads. My reflections on these, informed by a subsequent correspondence with Cohen, will be presented as a paper at a later EASLCE conference. By the end we seemed to be able to ask the fundamental question of all: What is ecocriticism for?

The papers from the ASLE UK conference will be offered for an ecocriticism special issue of New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics to be co-edited by Wendy Wheeler and Hugh Dunkerley.

3. From May 27-28th 2005, Tamkang University in Tamsui, Taiwan hosted its Third International Conference on Ecological Discourse, taking as its focus the discourse on natural catastrophe.

The more than 30 presentations were about equally divided between Chinese and English. They offered a wide range of perspectives from different disciplines, with a clear emphasis on literary topics. EASCLE was represented by three of its members. Chairman Axel Goodbody delivered the opening keynote lecture on the motif of nature’s revenge in recent German-speaking literature and film, and member of the advisory committee Catrin Gersdorf gave a talk on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Both also sat on the roundtable discussing the question of the “naturalness” of natural catastrophe which closed the conference.

The conference provided the welcome opportunity to meet with representatives of ASLE Japan, as well as to establish contacts with two scholars who are currently in the process of setting up a new branch of ASLE in India.

3. New publications

\\\\\\\'Earthographies: Ecocriticism and Culture\\\\\\\' will be appearing in April 2008 as Issue No. 64 of the journal New Formations. (See the New Formations website at
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/contents.html). Contents:

Wendy Wheeler and Introduction
Hugh Dunkerley

Terry Gifford Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism

John Parham The Poverty of Ecocritical Theory: E.P. Thompson and the British Perspective

Dana Phillips Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, and a Creed Outworn

Patrick Curry Nature Post-Nature

Noel Keough Sustaining Authentic Human Experience in Community

Jonathan Coope The Ecological Blind Spot in Postmodernism

William Gray On the Road: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Views on Nature

Adrian Ivakhiv Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Towards a Jamesonian Ecocriticism

Cary Wolfe Learning from Temple Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject

Ron Broglio Heidegger’s Shepherd of Being and Nietzsche’s Satyr

Wendy Wheeler Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading Beyond Words – and Ecocriticism

4. TV Appearance

The launching of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow in the spring of 2004 and the success of German novelist Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm prompted the Bayerische Rundfunk, one of Germany’s regional public TV stations, to host a talk show under the title “Kommt übermorgen die Eiszeit?” (Will another Ice Age start tomorrow?). The invited guests were Schätzing, Prof. Wolfgang Seiler, a climatologist from Karlsruhe, Sabine Bock, the head of Green City e.V., an environmental organization based in Munich, Michael Althen, movie critic forFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , and Catrin Gersdorf, EASCLE member and American studies scholar. Although disagreeing on the degree to which literature and film should obey the scientific ‘truth’ about the state of our global environment, and in spite of diverging opinions about the aesthetic quality of eco-apocalyptic scenarios such as Emmerich’s, the discussants agreed that literature and film serve an important function for keeping environmental issues on the public agenda.

5. Book Reviews

1. Terry Gifford, Review of two books in the Credo Series, edited by Scott Slovic

Rick Bass, Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism, Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1999, ISBN 1-57131-224-2

Pattiann Rogers,The Dream of The Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation, Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1999, ISBN 1-57131-225-0

Each book in this series consists of an essay by an American nature writer that intended to be read as a ‘credo’, a profile by Scott Slovic and a full bibliography of the author\\\\\\\'s work and the criticism of that work. Details of the series are on the publisher\\\\\\\'s website: www.milkweed.org

I\\\\\\\'ve looked at two books in the series and the essays are very different. Rick Bass develops a four-part meditation on the tensions between art and activism for his role as both a writer and activist on behalf of the Yaak Valley in Montana where he has made his home. This essay explores the issues raised so brilliantly in Bass\\\\\\\'s brief, but ground-breaking, postmodern narrative, Fiber (University of Georgia Press, 1998). Whilst acting as a case-study of a writer and activist (Who would be the European equivalent?), this essay raises questions that European narrative/nature writers/journalists have hardly begun to consider, such are our cultural compartments in European publishing (somebody prove me wrong). One of many practical ideas in this book is the following little scheme that sounds like something we could adapt as a creative research project in a European context:

Bass is struggling in his current work to break out of the mould of American nature writing by finding new forms, new mixes of discourse that challenge readers, new kinds of post-pastoral: \\\\\\\'Damn artists - always trying to pretty a place up, and trying to summon some basic plan of order from a far more complex assemblage of order that already exists, but which is simply not yet visible\\\\\\\' (114).

Pattiann Rogers provides a commentary linking her poems that is, in effect, an introduction to her selected poems, full texts included. Her work is interesting in its combination of science and sensuality, her human family and her sense of kinship with the biotic community, her marshalling the detail of the material in an often playful engagement with a larger mystery. The central notion of this essay is one worth consideration as another research project: testing Gary Snyder\\\\\\\'s suggestion that there is \\\\\\\'No Nature\\\\\\\', to what extent is the imagination, and its expression in poetry, say, created by that which it is creating? \\\\\\\'Imagine the marsh wren making himself/created by the marsh, inside the marsh/ of his own creation, unaware of his being/ inside this dream of mine where I imagine/ he dreams …\\\\\\\'(4). Perhaps this is one answer to the issue raised by ASLE EU’s ‘Nature as a Cultural Project’: how have we historically constructed, say in gender and class terms, a nature from which much of society (the European Left certainly) now seem to be alienated, but which has actually constructed us and our literature? And is our literary imagination in post-industrial Europe in any sense formed by the unprecedented levels of ecological waste and destruction that we create? The struggles of these two American writers, in prose and in poetry, raise a lot of questions might provide interesting answers in a European context.

2. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New Critical Idiom Series), London: Routledge 2004
Besprechung von Jenny Elster

Aufgabengebiete
Wie Garrard in seiner Einführung zu der kulturkritischen Forschungsrichtung Ecocriticism offenbart, hat sich diese traditionell mit Literatur und ursprünglich vornehmlich mit Texten der Romantik beschäftigt. Da jedoch der Bezug zur Gegenwart immer wichtiger geworden ist, und die Richtung somit zu einer wahrhaften Kulturkritik geworden ist, werden heute auch kulturelle Erscheinungen wie Naturfilme, Werbespots, Fotografie etc. mitbehandelt. Diese neue Ausrichtung und diese querdenkenden Ansätze geben den Ecocritics die Möglichkeit in der brennend aktuellen Umwelt-Diskussion mitzureden.

Welche Standpunkte im Umweltdenken vorherrschen und welche Schwerpunkte im Ecocriticism gesetzt werden können, stellt Garrard im zweiten Kapitel, Positions, dar. Interessanterweise fängt er seine Präsentation mit einer Interessengruppe an, die mit Umweltschutz nichts zu tun haben möchte. Die Gegenseite zählt in einer Diskussion natürlich dazu.

Die Beziehung Natur – Kultur stellt ein immens großes Forschungsgebiet dar. So groß wie die Aufgabe ist, dürfte es eine Vielzahl von möglichen Herangehensweisen geben.

Methode
Garrard hat in Ecocriticism eine semantische Methode gewählt. Er hat sechs Wörter, die für unsere Auffassung von und unser Verhalten gegenüber der Natur eine zentrale Rolle spielen, analysiert. Er hat sie auf ursprüngliche Bedeutung, Bedeutungswandel und heutige Verwendung geprüft.
Die Weltbilder von heute zu entdecken scheint eine wichtige Aufgabe des Ecocriticisms zu sein und die semantische Methode birgt sicherlich viele Möglichkeiten. Mit Wörtern wird oft unbedacht umgegangen, und sie auf ihre eigentliche Bedeutung zu prüfen, ist deshalb eine Enthüllungsarbeit, die unter anderem dazu dient Klarheit in die Kommunikation zu bringen und Wissen über das eigene Weltbild zu erweitern. Garrard nennt die von ihm analysierten Wörter ‘Tropen’, da sie bildhafte Vorstellungen sind.

Bei dem Begriff Pollution angefangen macht Garrard deutlich, wie ein Wort neue Bedeutungen erlangen kann. Interessanterweise geht die Entwicklung dieses Wortes in eine zum Normalfall entgegengesetzte Richtung, und zwar von einer moralischen Bedeutung zu einer materiellen, wobei allerdings die moralische Konnotation nicht geringfügig erhalten bleibt. Anfänglich als seelische Verunreinigung gesehen, wird Pollution im Zeitalter der schädlichen industriellen Emissionen zur Weltbedrohung und zum Schlagwort.
Schlagwörter scheinen die Eigenschaft zu besitzen, schnell ihre Einsatzgebiete zu erweitern und in verwandte Sphären überzugreifen. So wird zum Beispiel auch Verkehrslärm heute gern als eine Art Kontaminierung gesehen.
Auch Wörter selbst können kontaminiert werden, in Verruf kommen und unbrauchbar werden. In seinem Wilderness-Kapitel weist Garrard darauf hin, dass eben dieses Wort oft von an der Umwelt uninteressierten Autoherstellern benutzt wird, um ihre Produkte zu verkaufen. Dieses Beispiel macht deutlich wie wichtig es ist, die Bedeutungswandel im Auge zu behalten.

Ideengeschichte
Das Erforschen von Weltbildern bedarf aber nicht nur der Semantik, sondern eben so sehr das Erforschen der Geschichte der Ideen. In dem Kapitel zu der Vorstellung einer nahe bevorstehenden Apocalypse zum Beispiel präsentiert Garrard die Vorgeschichte des Apokalypse-Gedanken. Eine interessante Erkenntnis stellt die Tatsache dar, dass obwohl große Teile der westlichen Welt heute als areligiös zu bezeichnen wäre, sich nicht viel an der Furcht vor einem baldigen Ende der Welt geändert zu haben scheint.

Garrard spricht mehrmals das Thema Christentum, als Verursacher unseres Verhaltens der Natur gegenüber, an. Die Berechtigung der Menschen, sich die Erde untertan zu machen, sei in der Bibel niedergelegt. Im 17. Jahrhundert habe Descartes mit seinem extremen Dualismus zwischen Geist und Materie die Zweiteilung vollzogen und somit den Boden für die Wissenschaft geebnet. Das alte Testament sowie die Schriften René Descartes wären somit die Hauptverursacher der heutigen umweltschädlichen Weltauffassung. Ich bezweifle nicht, dass Garrard damit Recht hat. Die beiden Postulate stellen aber offensichtlich große Vereinfachungen dar.

Die Wahrheiten der Ökologie
In seinem Buch weist Garrard mehrmals darauf hin, dass Ecocriticism im Unterschied zu anderen Methoden/Ausrichtungen der Literaturanalyse als Partner einer faktenorientierten Naturwissenschaft in ihrem Wahrheitsbezug und –anspruch einzigartig ist. Dieser Umstand macht die Richtung meines Erachtens sehr interessant, wobei ich allerdings vorsichtiger mit dem Wahrheitsbegriff umgehen würde als Garrard es tut. Bei Naturwissenschaftlern geht es um empirisch nachweisbare Fakten. Thesen erweisen sich als wahr oder unwahr. Das Wort Wahrheit - oder truth - hingegen kann unendlich Vieles bedeuten. Zudem erhebt so gut wie jeder auf die Wahrheit Anspruch, so dass nur wer sich auf ewig hinziehende Diskussionen über letzte Dinge einlassen möchte, das Wort benutzen sollte.

Schließlich: Für sehr interessant halte ich die Entwicklung der Ökologie selbst, wie sie in Ecocriticism dargestellt wird. An der Vorstellung von einer vermeintlichen immanenten Harmonie der Natur wird gerüttelt, was für unser Naturverständnis erhebliche Folgen haben müsste. Die Tatsache einer sich nicht selbst regulierenden Natur und nach keinem Gleichgewicht strebender Ökosysteme dürfte meines Erachtens vieles in Frage stellen. Die Ecocritics könnten in dieser „post-modernen“ Diskussion eine wichtige Rolle spielen.