1. Esther Kinskys Gelände-Texte: Ein ‚nicht-modernes‘ Genre der vielen möglichen Ökologien
- Author
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Simon Probst
- Subjects
Poetry ,Anthropocene ,Poetics ,Philosophy ,Modernity ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Reading (process) ,Declaration ,Nature writing ,German literature ,Epistemology ,media_common - Abstract
This paper addresses the relations of Nature Writing and the Anthropocene discourse in contemporary German literature. My reading of Esther Kinsky’s Gelande-Poetik (‘poetics of terrain’), especially of her novel Am Fluss (2014), reveals how ‘Nature Writing of the Anthropocene’ (Hummelsund Voie 2017) resists an all too easy declaration of the ‘end of nature’. Hence, terminologies of Anthropocene discourse such as Timothy Morton’s ‘ecology without nature’ prove to be inadequate for the description of Kinsky’s Gelande-Poetik. Instead, her Gelande-Texte (‘terrain texts’) perform an ongoing multiplication of natures, cultures, their entanglements, as well as their separations. Yet, the texts’ aesthetic relations to their environment are too self-reflective and complex as to be fully captured by Morton’s ‚ambient poetics.‘ Drawing on Latourian theory, this paper therefore proposes a reconceptualization of Nature Writing’s poetic form, aiming for a better understanding of its counter-discoursive force in modernity as well as in the Anthropocene.
- Published
- 2020
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