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Although classical physics states that the void lacks matter or energy, the misunderstanding of emptiness as a spatial concept extends far beyond the sciences. The essay explores the concept of empty space, debunking classical physics’ notion of voidness by delving into quantum mechanics, where energy and particles continually manifest through a site investigation of the Salmon & Sterling Nuclear Test Site (located in Lumberton, MS, USA). This revelation challenges colonial ideologies, exemplified by terra nullius, which justified empire-building by claiming certain lands devoid of inhabitants. Operating through a political-geological exploration of repetitive cycles of extraction, speculation, and vacancy at the Salmon & Sterling Site spanning from the Mesozoic Era to the present day, I scrutinize spatial constructions and their reinforcement of prevailing socio-political systems. Juxtaposed against Faulkner’s Southern Gothic literature and Sartre’s existentialism, this essay underscores a modern dialectic between spatial arrangements and anticipations of cataclysmic endings. Through a passenger-traveler account of void-encounter, I propose a reconsideration of “emptiness” through examining its broader spatio-temporal origins and implications in relation to the nuclear detonations. This perspective allows for the synthesis of the inherent paradox of this site: initially conceived from Cold War anxieties to solidify social structures, yet also harboring unpredictable and potentially mutant futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ecocritical implications of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by analyzing the main character's paradoxical relationship to the non-human world. The novella's aged and therefore untypical Hemingway protagonist, Santiago, is a remarkably compassionate, unselfish, and likeable character. What makes him likeable is his unprejudiced openness to the world, his love for animals as well as for human beings, and his own self-interrogation. He perceives the creatures of the sea as his friends and brothers, but nevertheless he kills them. The article argues that though Santiago reveals a bourgeoning environmental consciousness quite modern for its time, he also represents the blind spots humans have concerning their relation to the non-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the planet’s ecological crisis deepens, what can music reveal about the shapes that environmentalism is taking across the world? This article shows that music is a sensory pathway into notions of nature and of saving nature in repressed and marginalised places. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork since 2010 in the war-torn Burma–China–India borderlands, I explore a dissident rock band’s pioneering environmentalist song. The song’s Kachin Jinghpaw language lyrics talk of ecological destruction through a worldwide trope—‘nature is crying’—but express more specifically a nationalist and religious environmentalism. The song calls on Christian Kachin people to rescue a God-given national homeland, amid the broader album’s call for ethnonational resistance against a ‘colonising’ military regime in Burma (Myanmar). I explore the song’s lyrics and karaoke music video—line-by-line and scene-by-scene—as a way to sense both the logic and feeling of environmentalism emerging amid war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trying to answer the challenges proposed by the Laudato si' encyclical letter and its proposed "integral ecology," this essay deals with the possible interactions between ecotheology, ecophenomenology, and cultural anthropology, outlining an interdisciplinary approach to Incarnation. In the first part, the core ideas of the aforementioned encyclical are discussed. In the second part, ecotheology is discussed as an answer to the critiques that see in Christianism a hindrance against a deeper ecological thought. The third part discusses ecophenomenology, while proposing to integrate within the debate some new theoretical proposals. The fourth part discusses how to "cross the Rubicon" between ecotheology and ecophenomenology, while also describing both limits and opportunities for such crossings. In the conclusions, some ideas for further research are proposed, in the sense of a layered theory of Incarnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on exploring how artistic storytelling and interspecies relationships can reshape urban ecologies and power structures in the context of the Grand Paris project. Topics include new materialist approaches to urban ecocriticism, the symbolic use of honeycomb geometry to challenge rigid territorial imaginaries, and the critical examination of sustainability in Parisian urban redevelopment plans.

Climate change is a global crisis that all of humanity must collectively address. Therefore, there is a need to educate future generations, namely infants, on climate change through international cooperation. In this context, this study aimed to analyze picturebooks on climate change read by infants in China and Korea, two neighboring countries in East Asia. To achieve this, we examined the publication status of climate change picturebooks in both countries, identifying similarities and differences in content. The research yielded the following results. First, there were significant differences in the publication status of climate change picturebooks in China and Korea. Second, both Chinese and Korean picturebooks realistically presented the causes of climate change, but depicted its impacts as a combination of real and fictitious effects. Finally, Korea demonstrated a broader range of actions to mitigate climate change compared to China. Based on these findings, we provided insights for climate change education in China and Korea, and proposed inter-country educational cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the comic depictions of environmental disaster in Chaucer's Miller's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale in light of real environmental disasters—floods, famines, and plagues—of the fourteenth century, in order to better understand how Chaucer's comedy functions as environmental rhetoric. Ecocriticism and comedy theory are used to explore Chaucer's comedy as a rhetoric that encourages resilience in the face of traumatic environmental events. In the Miller's Tale, comic depictions of a prophesied flood bring fantasies of environmental control back down to earth and ground audiences in the reality of the moment. In the Nun's Priest's Tale, comic allusions to famine, plague, and agrarian collapse foreground human connectedness with many kinds of life. In both cases, Chaucer's comedy encourages audiences to adapt creatively to the environmental challenges of their time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes, as its starting point, Andreas Malm's effort, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire , to legitimize and normalize property destruction in the context of the climate movement. The sabotage of energy infrastructures, I counter, cannot make sense, for it poses a threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. Recent protests entailing the defacement of paintings share with ecocriticism an investment in an essentially liberal, pedagogical and moral covenant, one that urges witnesses to undergo an individual process of reflection in order to acquire or affirm values and priorities friendlier to the environment. Sabotage, by contrast, violates this covenant; blowing up a pipeline may be said to have met its goals by reducing and slowing the supply of oil, regardless of what the public learned from sabotage's mediatization. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetic education, I argue that sabotage introduces absurdity into a category—action—that the climate movement otherwise insists is self-identical. Sabotage does this by subtracting the world wherein putatively future-bound actions, including having and raising a child, mean what they do. I test out this claim in a reading of Nell Zink's novel The Wallcreeper and Benedikt Erlingsson's film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), two absurdist comedies that formally amplify the semiotic crisis induced by sabotage and, in so doing, enable us to confront the necessary dislocation of politics from sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the most elaborate of Paula Meehan's 'Greek' poems, 'Flight JIK Olympic Airlines 016 to Ikaria, Greece' (Painting Rain , 2009), inspired by her journey to Ikaria, in the framework of travel writing and ecocriticism. By transforming the matrix of W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', and by representing a specific case of ecopoetry, Meehan's text challenges the precepts of footsteps and vertical travel genres. The comparison between the two poems has been contextualized by the Irish poet's environmental, political and artistic concerns, as well as her other poems, essays and travels in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture is the property of University of California Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The objective of this research is to explore the environmental themes shown in Michael Punke's novel, titled The Revenant, with a focus on the complex relationship between the protagonist, Hugh Glass, the surrounding environment, and interaction. This descriptive research uses the ecocriticism theory to analyze the data and address the related questions. The novel vividly depicts nature as the surrounding forest and the diverse array of animals as the central character. As a frontiersman, Glass perceives nature as a realm to be conquered, which resorts to actions such as felling trees and hunting animals. However, the consequences of these actions significantly impact the natural world. The research findings underscored the disadvantageous and imbalanced nature of the human-environment relationship driven by humans’ exploitative tendencies with little consideration for environmental preservation. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are evident in the ecological degradation and the personal suffering experienced by Hugh Glass, hence the novel's critique of this complex interaction between humans and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecocriticism is an advancing field in literature that has opened up avenues in reading world literature from a whole new perspective. This paper seeks to flesh out ecocritical concerns in the selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Shihab Nye by using selected concepts of the theory of ecocriticism given by Greg Garrard: pastoral, wilderness, and the sublime. An analysis of the poetry by the selected writers, sharing their roots from the Arab world, reveals their agenda of using nature as a trope in the form of resistance to colonialism. The writers give a glimpse of the people of their homeland and their culture imbued in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a decade of dormancy following the release of Tōhō Studios' Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Godzilla and other kaijū burst back onto the scene with Legendary Pictures' Godzilla (2014). Several American sequels and a television series set in Legendary's MonsterVerse quickly followed over the next ten years. Meanwhile, Japan's Tōhō used their radioactive creation's global success to reignite their own films with Shin Godzilla (2016), an animated trilogy, and Godzilla Minus One (2023). Short-format media like Chibi Godzilla and Godziban also circulated thanks to streaming services. Similarly, Godzilla's longtime competitor Gamera also emerged from hibernation in an animated series produced by Kadokawa Corporation, Gamera Rebirth (2023). But how do these new installations relate to or depart from their predecessors' predilection to address environmental concerns? This article continues the ecocritical analysis of kaijū eiga, expanding it to the 2010s and 2020s, as a coda to our duograph Japan's Green Monsters (2018). This article picks up where we left off, examining the recent releases from an ecocritical standpoint. This analysis reveals that today's films remain steeped in environmental commentary, but both fragmented and updated for the new concerns of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan's Feng ru Fei tun, published in 1996 Murakami Haruki's Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, published in 1994-1995, and Gabriel García Márquez's El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985, which root in Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American cultures, respectively. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the female body parallels the environment by displaying non-human characteristics and relating to natural elements in these three works; on the other hand, it deconstructs the boundary between the environment and humans by playing a crucial role in constructing human identity. This paper draws on theories of posthumanism, material feminism, and ecofeminism to explore the depiction of the female body and its role in rethinking the environment. The cultural hybridity of local and non-local worldviews—a key reason for situating this study within a transnational comparative framework—serves as a crucial element in demonstrating how the female body bridges the environment and human identity across all three works. This analysis aims to deconstruct the anthropocentric perspective on the environment, thereby rethinking the role of the female body in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Folklor / Edebiyat is the property of Cyprus International University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

AbstractThis research explores how picturebooks can enhance ecocritical awareness and sustainable attitudes among 97 primary school children aged 8–9 in a Spanish school. The study includes 24 reading sessions in three formats: individual, small group, and adult-mediated. The selection of the corpus for children’s readings aligns with theoretical studies focusing on an ecocritical approach to children’s literature, a scholarly perspective that has gained prominence in recent decades. Results indicate that adult-mediated sessions are more effective than individual or small-group readings, fostering greater emotional and cognitive engagement. While students generally showed an ecocentric perspective, an anthropocentric view of sustainability persisted. The study highlights that, although guided reading is beneficial, a more integrated and multidimensional educational approach is needed to cultivate a regenerative consciousness. The educator’s role is crucial for guiding students toward deeper, more meaningful ecocritical understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis study identified the number of natural environment picturebooks read by young children in Chinese and Korean picturebook libraries and analyzed their content from an ecocritical perspective. The findings indicate that, first, although the number of natural environment picturebooks read by children is higher in Korea than in China, in both countries, these books make up a small proportion of all books read. Second, the covers and endpapers of these picturebooks concisely represent the stories, stimulating children’s curiosity. Additionally, the analysis using the chronotope showed that natural environment picturebooks enabled children to experience changes in time while emotionally empathizing with the protagonists. This study reveals that natural environment picturebooks read by young children in China and Korea provide cognitive and emotional content but lack in actionable content. Therefore, parental, educational, and societal support is necessary to enhance children’s practices in environmental conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although often overlooked by mainstream accounts of political theology and ecocriticism in the Global North, powerful visions of an ecopolis have been emerging in Latin America. In this article, we review the status of mainstream approaches to notions such as subject, citizen, and personal dignity and put them in a critical dialogue with Latin American Ecofeminist Political Theologies (LAEPT). We argue that those notions, often conceived from a Western and anthropocentric perspective, show their limits when interrogated from the perspective of LAEPT. Accordingly, we suggest that their main contribution lies not only in their critique of the Western paradigm but also in advancing alternative conceptions of an ecologically conscious political community that considers the Earth as sacred, and nature as a reflection of the divine. We conclude that such conceptions can also be seen at work in the rights of nature enshrined in the so-called new Latin American Constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the environment features prominently in the poetry of Joe Ushie, studies of his works have focused more on sociopolitical themes than on his eco-conscious engagement. Using Bette-Bendi indigenous epistemology as its conceptual framework, this article analyses how Ushie's poetry addresses environmental issues by portraying the mutually dependent relation between humans and non-human agents. Since the environment is one of the central components of Ushie's poetic vision, this article draws on the poet's Bette-Bendi indigenous ecological imagination to explore the ways in which humans and their environments are interconnected. The article traces Ushie's depiction of the way Bette-Bendi people see human and environmental values as inseparable. His poetry thus explores systems that can guide people's relationship with the natural world in a postcolonial context; this article provides an alternative perspective to ecocritical reading of literary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asian literature has a history of engaging with ecocriticism and environmentalism from a postcolonial, locally specific perspective. New materialism shares this ecocritical commitment through its posthumanist conceptions of embodiment and material entanglement between human and nonhuman material agencies. Despite their common interest in alternative possibilities for human and nonhuman engagement, new materialism and South Asian literature have rarely come into meaningful contact with each other. My article seeks to bring both fields together by examining Kiran Desai's novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard from a new materialist perspective, in which human and nonhuman characters interact with each other in imagining posthumanist possibilities of being in the world. I mobilise Karen Barad's agential realist theory and Stacy Alaimo's concept of trans-corporeality to argue that Desai's light-hearted comic satire raises important questions about environmental and human exploitation. Examinations of the local, national, global, and historical aspects of India's material reality reveal the agential realist nature of human and nonhuman interactions within the novel's rural postcolonial context. This reading expands the scope of new materialism into South Asian literature and furthers the possibility of using new materialist theory to engage with ecocriticism from a postcolonial perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ethical implications of the use of Foley sound in wildlife documentaries. Almost all of the sounds that animals seem to make in these films and television programmes are added by Foley artists; animals in the wild are often filmed using telephoto lenses, beyond the reach of microphones. Crew or vehicle noise will also often muddy sounds recorded on location and so a clean soundtrack must be created in post-production. This article is based on first-hand interviews conducted with practising Foley artists. It details some of the techniques that Foley artists use to simulate the sounds of animals walking, chewing, scratching or otherwise engaging with their environments. It then draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas to frame ethical activity as the act of encountering the other in terms which recognize and accept their otherness as such. I suggest first that Foley might impede such an ethical encounter with animal life because it seems, at first, to anthropomorphize the animal and to reduce them to a subset of the human. I go on to suggest, however, that Foley is also invested in representing what the biologist Jakob von Uexküll has labelled the umwelt of the animal – the animal's unique 'lifeworld'. According to this reading, Foley does ethical work in the wildlife documentary; it brings us to an encounter with the animal's otherness and intimates that humanity's own umwelt is but one amongst many. In this way, Foley reveals that the human perception of the world is neither objective nor universal nor absolute. It decentres the human in the way we conceive the world and ethically frames the animal Other as coequal with the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speaking to a small audience in Brussels in 1947, Francis Ponge described his poetic practice as "writing in the desert." This paper examines Ponge's notion of "writing in the desert" as it pertains to his 1942 collection Le Parti pris des choses, focusing on the ecological critique embedded within a seemingly dry discussion of things, particularly his discussion of the pebble. In turning to the mundane and the quotidian, more specifically by writing about humble objects such as the pebble, Ponge challenges us to not only reconsider our relationship to the natural world, but to recognize the linguistic dimension which undergirds our conception of any such relationship. This analysis examines the challenge presented by Ponge's pebble in relation to a more famous literary pebble, that of Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausée. While the pebble in Sartre provokes a metaphysical disturbance, this paper argues that the pebble in Ponge presents an urgent ecological critique, a critique concerned with poetic expression as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Désert (1980) is a landmark novel, first and foremost for personal reasons but also for its location at the junction of several French intellectual and aesthetic dynamics. The work marks a significant stage in Le Clézio's career as a writer. Whereas his previous novels, from Le Procès-verbal (1963) onwards, evoked contemporary (even futuristic) urban spaces and their perils, Désert (1980) is set between the desert of Morocco and the city of Marseille, from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. The novel engages Le Clézio's work in a more assertive representation of travel and foreign countries. It also encounters several French intellectual movements: a critical evaluation of colonization, growing ecological concerns, the evocation of the difficult migration from the Maghreb to France, and a fascination for the desert space. Considering all these elements, the paper proposes a socio-critical re-reading of this important novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses and elaborates on the insights gained from the teaching of a course in Environment, Literature and Culture at a university in the north of Thailand. The course was designed as an invitation to English major students to develop sustain-abilities (vulner-abilities, attend-abilities, and response-abilities). In an effort to overcome the anthropocentrism of traditional humanistic ecocritical pedagogies, both the course and this case study have been framed by posthumanist ontology and educational theory. From this standpoint, curriculum and pedagogy constitute a relational, open-ended, more-than-human entanglement of agencies, practices, discourses, matters, and encounters assembled in the process of teaching and learning. The dialogical and situated invitations of this course contributed to assemble a literacy situation that seemed to foster in students an embodied, affective, experienced, relational sense of becoming-together with nonhuman others. While it is unclear whether the participation in the course will continue to motivate their collective and individual actions beyond this literacy situation, the encounters and relations between these students and the many nonhumans assembled in the ecocritical classroom constitute by themselves bewildering learning experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use of Greek mythology in current ecological discourse. In Classical Studies, specifically in Classical Tradition studies, the ecocritical revision of Greco-Latin texts and their survival is still in its infancy. The ecological question is usually approached as a reconstruction of notions and uses of nature, with little reference to the contemporary philosophical and cultural discourse that revolves around the cultural causes of the climate crisis, its historical paradoxes, and its future projections. This has led to a situation in which ancient mythology, especially Greek mythology, is used by ecological discourse representatives for argumentative, explanatory, or informative purposes without the required textual criticism and scientific rigor. This paper insists on the need to critically review the ecological readings of Greek mythology to avoid contradictions, paradoxes, or biased interpretations that could weaken the ecocritical debate. Specifically, two predominant tendencies are analyzed: the argumentative use of myth (e.g., in the case of the adamantine chains of Prometheus or the use of Platonic myths) and its resemanticization for a specific discursive purpose (e.g., the reductionist interpretations of Gaia and Medusa) in authors such as Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Ursula Heise, or Donna Haraway. The results show that the treatment of Greek myths in the ecological discourse is often subordinated to argumentative needs, avoiding alternative mythographic sources that relativize what has been exposed or venturing into biased interpretations that can lead to undesired contradictions concerning the postulates of the ecological discourse itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper undertakes the eco-spatial re-reading of two Malayalam movies, Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Malik (2021), using the framework of solastalgia. Solastalgia is an environmental philosophy developed by Glenn Albrecht that refers to the feeling of abandonment and isolation in relation to a drastically transformed spatial circumstance. It is the paradoxical sense of homelessness while still being home. The paper argues that solastalgia is a heuristic framework to analyse unjust geographies and reimagine them as forums for creative resilience, collective strength, and political action. The movies explore the ramifications of lived space on the life of people living in it and its coalescing with other social, political, and economic categories of injustice. Kumbalangi tells the story of four brothers living on a stranded island in the neighbourhood of a city and how they creatively resist the solastalgic distress caused by the neoliberal social order. Malik, set in a densely populated coastal village, delineates how solastalgia is instrumental in excessive criminalisation and breakage of the social fabric. The discussion of the movies seeks to show how cultural narratives such as films can be seen as important tools to represent unjust geographies, and resist them through rebellious re-imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response to Dylan Henderson's article on "Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings" (#142), highlighting some of the problematic ecocritical and gender essentialist premises of his argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This research aims to analyze Virginia Woolf (1882-1942)’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) based on environmental narrative, egalitarian philosophy and ecosophy to criticize anthropocentrism. The theoretical framework is mainly based on Arne Naess’s philosophies of egalitarianism and ecosophy which show how Woolf, through environmental narratives, clarifies the significance of nature and environment. Naess believes that a systematic discipline in terms of philosophical view is essential to develop interconnectedness between humans and nature or ecological system. He assumes that self-realization is linked with ecological awareness, then knowing ecology or ecologism leads to ecosophy. In the novel, Orlando, as the main character, reaches a kind of ecological self-recognition and egalitarian tendency. When she is among gypsies, she is drawn to the eyecatching beauty of nature and she knows that how humans can be attached to nature without pay attention to their anthropocentric interest. The article finally indicates that how all living beings, including humans are respectful and humans are not unique species and must not spoil lands and nature to satisfy their own desires. Background of the Study: This study focuses on Orlando: A Biography and it is framed to investigate the novel by illustrating the environmental narrative through egalitarian philosophy and ecosophy. It also demonstrates that how humans seek the value of life, and their happiness and satisfaction. Virginia Woolf, as a British novelist, in Orlando ponders the various effects of time, from fifteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth century, on nature and environment. Woolf’s fictional character is subjectively a symbol of highlighting the egalitarian culture via environmental narratives. Woolf has utilized the natural world to portray the significance of its trouble created by humans. Therefore, she puts a lot of stress on nature, environment, and non-humans in her works. She can be regarded as a philosopher who has developed egalitarian culture designating respect for all the living beings and she struggles to show the interaction between humans and the earth that should be modified in a better way. Methodology: The present study applies the egalitarian philosophy and ecosophy which are categorized in the theory of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary study that concentrates on common grounds, relationships and affiliations exit between two different fields of study: ecology and literature. Arne Naess who is an eco-philosopher and ecocritic by turning to ecocriticism announces that the relationships between humans and nature can be possible by increasing ecological wisdom and awareness. Naess relies on biospherical egalitarianism that is to consider the environment as an entity that has its right to be safe. He believes that the rights of the environment are as important as human rights. The species’ equality is proposed by Naess. He comes to conclusions that all living beings must live on the planet earth without spoiling one another’s benefits and rights. As a result, this study illustrates how Naess as an ecocritic attempts to modify the interaction of humans, nature, and environment. Conclusion: Orlando is Woolf’s attempt to reveal how nature and environment have the same rights to be kept alive. Woolf uses environmental narrative to show the right place of humans in nature. She criticizes anthropocentrism and challenges the anthropocentric views through her narrative. She thinks that people need the ecological awareness to reach an egalitarian perspective not to hurt nature and environment any longer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Journal of Cultural Studies / Kultur Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The genre term climate fiction ('cli-fi') refers to fiction in which climate change is a major theme. When situated at the intersection of Anthropocene and literary studies, its usage raises questions on how writers might depict a just and representative climate future through storytelling, especially when contemporary publishing grapples with which voices get published and read at all. Rooted in a writing experiment conducted with five UK-based writers of colour, who were instructed to write climate fiction stories over the course of a month, this article explores how a redefinition of climate fiction as a genre – and, in turn, the imagination of possible futures – might begin by closely studying writers' creative processes, and how their lived experiences in a warming world translate into text. By weaving together literary and geographical theories concerning storytelling and the creative writing process, it suggests how more urgent, topical, and relatable climate stories might be told via the use of embodied testimonies of climate change considering race, place, religion, and an intersectional awareness of global warming's disproportionate impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environmental & Social Management Journal / Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental is the property of Environmental & Social Management Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (2020), the Doyle family home of High Place is a living, breathing structure. The home indelibly retains memories of dead women within its walls that it uses to communicate with the novel's protagonist, Noemí Taboada. Moreno-Garcia uses this supernatural home to address legacies of violence against women and minorities by staging the colonizer-colonized relationship for Noemí in areas of the home that are typically viewed as feminine or private, intimate spaces. She furthers this discussion by reshaping a typically European genre for a new audience while critically examining a contentious period of Mexico's history. Through an intersection of spatial theory, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism, this essay analyzes the way Moreno-Garcia constructs a haunting domestic space to confront patriarchal and colonizing legacies that are often suppressed in cultural and literary memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecocriticism, as a separate school of literary criticism, emerged during the 1970s to study the interconnection between literature and ecology from an interdisciplinary perspective. Deep ecology is one of the key concepts in ecocritical studies, advocated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, that foregrounds the promotion of ecological consciousness among the human community. The deep ecological principles also highlight the depletion of natural resources through excessive human interference and exploitative attitudes. This paper attempts to critically examine the deep ecological principles in Anuradha Roy's novel All the Lives We Never Lived (2018). Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, editor, and journalist, and her novels gained significance not only in India but also in several countries, making her one of the prominent voices of contemporary Indian Literature. This paper explores the need for humans to realise the inherent values of the non-human world and to promote harmonious coexistence with the environment by valuing the richness and diversity of life forms and utilising them only to satisfy their vital needs. It further examines the need for a decrease in population for non-human life to flourish and to reduce excessive human interference with the ecosystem. This paper reiterates the necessity to adhere to each deep ecological principle, accentuating the significant, transformative changes to be embraced to promote environmental responsibility for sustainable living. These aspects are elucidated through relevant instances from the chosen novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to flesh out the biosemiotic and ecological literacies of selected ecopoems from the collection Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (2017). I recognize the biosemiotic fact that every living organism of nature possesses the ability to inventively pursue their environments made possible through an active engagement of signs in the environment. Grounded on the ecocritical theories of Hubert Zapf, David Orr and Jacob von Uexkull and the descriptive-analytical research design, I analyze Philippine ecopoetry and how it can substantially bring readers within the environment itself and experience its attendant forces shaping it on both micro and macro heights. Ecopoetry allows us to better comprehend the particularities and complexities of the environment and the workings of our biologies. It positions its readers within the intricate spheres of the environment. Echoing the concept of ecological literacy, the reader becomes more knowledgeable and intimate with the environmental space recreated through the words of the poet. In the analysis, I recognize the ecoliterate affinities of the poets and their works highlighting ecocritical discourses on biophilia, topophilia, topophobia, anthropocentric activities, holism and systems thinking. These affinities are further dissected with the aid of biosemiotics. Biosemiotics looks into the complexities of the environment emphasizing various significant organisms and occurrences that shape environmental connections and disconnections. In the ecopoems, there are signs and occurrences that can be specifically interpreted shaping environmental connections. These are essential in understanding the processes that make nature and culture experience connections and disconnnections.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the world came to realize the significant relationship between air and human health. This pandemic, which changed the course of many lives, demonstrated how air serves as a transmitter of viruses. However, this quality of air is not new, with air acting as a significant tool in transmitting diseases, pollution, and even death. It is crucial to understand that airborne diseases include but are not limited to epidemics or pandemics such as the black death, influenza, or COVID-19. Since the Chernobyl disaster, it is perceived that the previously feared disasters were replaced by new and human-made hazards such as toxicity and radioactivity. Environmental disasters such as the Bhopal disaster, Donora Smog, and the Chernobyl disaster emphasize the impact of toxic chemicals on humans and more-than-human lives. These disasters show that toxic substances that threaten the lives of all living things imperceptibly seep into the soil, water, and air, causing harm to ecosystems, and entering into human and more-than-human bodies. Exposure to toxicity and radioactivity can happen in the blink of an eye, transmitted through the air we breathe. Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise presents a significant example of toxicity through its striking portrayal of an airborne toxic event. This event, the appearance of a cloud of the fictional chemical Nyodene D., presents an environmental crisis through which relationships between air and environments can be explored. Similar to the issues and reflections experienced after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the characters in White Noise experience chaos, uncertainty, and fear following the abrupt occurrence of an airborne toxic event.

This essay examines, ecocritically, geocritically, and comparatively, the metaphoric spaces represented in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters—seas, mountains, islands, jungle—to show that these spaces allow for different interpretations, yet they are spaces of individual imagination in both the play and the novel, suggesting transformation and metamorphosis. I argue that these literary spaces show a common feature of displacement, which allows human language to re-imagine other worlds—in literature and in visual arts. The spaces of imagination proliferated through Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Barnes’ novel have suffered a transformation in time and space, as they speak to past and present audiences and readers. The sea in Barnes’ chapter entitled “Shipwreck” symbolizes danger but also hope, as does the sea in the storm scene in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Mountain in Barnes’ eponymous chapter represents an isolated and inaccessible landscape on Mount Ararat, at the intersection of three cultures (Armenia, Turkey and Russia), but it also represents the biblical language of faith and hermitic isolation. Similarly, the island in The Tempest, which is—geologically—a mountain above the water, represents metaphorically the island of the mind. The jungle in Barnes’ chapter “Upstream” is a remote place in the forest on the Orinoco River, where Europeans and native Indians interact while making a movie; this movie is a work of visual art, represented in a novel; so is any one of the many productions of The Tempest, which reiterates the island’s imaginary space in various directorial interpretations. All these locations are metaphoric spaces of imagination, transmitted through different media, in which reality is transformed into literary representation by means of fictional description or theatrical action.

This article presents a rarely undertaken transcultural literary study, comparing the non-Indigenous novel Blå by Norwegian author Maja Lunde with the Indigenous novel The Back of the Turtle by Cherokee (US-American and Canadian) author Thomas King. By exploring the co-evolutionary relationships among art, literature, culture, ecosystems, and the environment, this study positions itself within the framework of eco-cosmopolitanism. It examines human-Earth relations and possibilities for action in the face of the climate and environmental crises portrayed in the novels. The analysis engages equally with Eurowestern approaches—ecophenomenology, ecophilosophy, ecopsychology, and ecocriticism—to address themes related to ecological elegies, ecological grief, the ethics of mourning, and symbiocenic critiques of the Anthropocene, and with Indigenous concepts of all-relatedness, particularly Anishinaabeg epistemologies and the cosmogonic story of Skywoman. By juxtaposing an Indigenous narrative's capacity to convey storied resilience and survivance in the midst of extreme crises with a non-Indigenous narrative's reliance on didactic warnings, negotiations, and techno-managerialism, this article underscores the importance of Indigenous perspectives in transcultural, eco-cosmopolitan approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an ecocritical approach to the analysis of the nature/culture divide in Oscar Wilde's "The Young King" and "The Star-Child". These two tales contrast the realm of nature, embodied in the forest, and the realm of civilisation, represented by the city. Both stories focus on the protagonists' journey from wilderness to the city, where not only do they need to become civilised subjects, but they are expected to govern as kings. This physical journey is matched by an internal one since both characters simultaneously undergo a transition from an animal-like state to a human one. I argue that these tales' use of the nature/culture and animal/human dichotomies is closely connected to Wilde's reflections about the Victorian social class system included in The Soul of Man under Socialism. Class struggle is indeed a major preoccupation in traditional folktales, where protagonists tend to magically escape from an initial disadvantaged position. Applying an ecocritical perspective to "The Young King" and "The Star-Child" helps to illustrate how these two tales manage to question the legitimacy of the hierarchical social structure by blurring the lines that separate the civilised subject from the animal one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the “vegetal turn” in film studies and posthuman philosophy, the article explores how experimental cinema can be a cultural mediator of vegetal forms of life. Posthumanist philosophy draws inspiration from cinema’s portrayal of both imaginary and real non-human entities as subjects and cohabitants on Earth. As subjects, these non-human entities are challenging generally accepted ideas about the principles of cognition, as well as our understanding of the causes and consequences of problems such as climate warming, Holocene extinction, and depletion of natural resources. The experimental film reveals connections between human and non-human agents through its unique film language and cinema ontology. The study examines how the film Enys Men (2022), directed by M. Jenkin, employs critical anthropomorphism to depict closely intertwined symbiotic relationships between all human and non-human agents, where memory as an embodied property connects various types of experience. In the film, access to awareness of the boundaries of life and death is challenged by non-human subjects such as lichens and Earth.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the imagery used in William Wordsworth's poem My Heart Leaps Up, examining its role in the context of Ecocriticism. By offering a close reading of the poem and drawing on various eco-critical perspectives, the researcher explores the relationship between the poem's imagery and concepts such as biocentrism, anthropocentrism, eco-feminism, and deep ecology. Additionally, the researcher compares My Heart Leaps Up with other nature poems by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, which helps us to identify particular stylistic and thematic features of the poem. This study aims to demonstrate how the use of imagery in My Heart Leaps Up connects to contemporary discourses on climate change and the anthropogenic epoch. This paper highlights the significance of My Heart Leaps Up within the broader context of Wordsworth's poetry and offers new theoretical and argumentative extensions to the reading of his nature poetry. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of how language and imagery can be used to convey the beauty and importance of the natural world and our role in it.

In response to the global environmental crisis, ecocriticism emerged in the 1970s, fitting the demands of the time and becoming a dynamic movement that continues to this day. Ecological theory acknowledges the equal existence of creatures, believing that all creatures are the same and that no species is dominating. From the innovative idea of ecocriticism, Vietnamese fictional prose after the Innovation 1986 years has emerged characters who share the sense of pain with all creatures. This article highlights the shift in environmental discourses, which no longer view humans as the lord of all creatures but rather as being able to listen to the voices of nature, care for injured animals, and love and protect all living things-a perspective that first established ecological ethics in Vietnamese literature.

In Indonesia, a country in which 70% of its area is water, people relate easily to both the sea and inland water, such as rivers and lakes. Authors consequently also find inspiration in these bodies of water, expressing their admiration towards the beauty of nature. For example, while they originate from different literary eras, “Danau Toba” (Lake Toba) by Sitor Situmorang, “Sepantun Laut” (Like the Sea) by J.E. Tatengkeng, “Akulah Si Telaga” (I am the Lake) by Sapardi Djoko Damono, “Apa Kata Bintang di Laut” (What the Star Tells the Sea) by Iwan Simatupang, “Kali Martapura” (Martapura River) by Hidjaz Yamani, and “Perempuan Pesisiran” (Women on the Coasts) by Iman Sembada all reflect the dynamic portrayals of water in Indonesian literature, as a charm of nature from each poet’s perspective or a framework for criticizing the realities of the lives of the people who live alongside water. This research analyzed these authors’ interconnectedness with nature, employing the qualitative descriptive method and using ecocriticism theory, which explores how nature is depicted in the respective poems and connects human relationships to nature. The results showed that the poets easily relate to the river, lake, or sea, and aside from describing the beauty of nature based on fond memories, their poems are used as critiques of the changing relationship between humans and nature, as well as between humans and humans. Their portrayals of nature further reveal the feelings of belonging engendered by water, which they use as criticism for the destruction of nature and societal changes stemming from the need for progress.

Contemporary Chinese science fiction (SF) is preoccupied with the representation of the Anthropocene. Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011) and Hui Hu’s The Azure Tragedy (2018) are stand-out examples. In light of the framework of ecocriticism, it is found that both writers challenge long-seated anthropocentric thinking and practices in their catastrophic narration of human-induced plastic pollution in the marine environment, increased extinction of species by human overharvesting, and the human-induced general destruction of nature. Both connect natural disasters to human causes and reflect on human supremacy. The futuristic imaginations enabled by the SF genre effectively unfold the slow violence humanity commits and remains oblivious to. However, the criticism offered by the two authors is compromised to some extent. Hui Hu is optimistic about the new technology in dealing with anthropogenic eco-problems, while this technological triumph appears to sidestep the possibility of finding a more sustainable and once-and-for-all solution. Wu Ming-yi implies a new ethical perspective that rejects human centrality and reestablishes the human-nature relationship. On the other hand, he overlooks intra-human inequality in causing and forcing people to experience the eco-catastrophes. This article contributes to a new understanding of contemporary Chinese Anthropocene SF from an ecocritical perspective.