The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text
Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and how Interpretation Works
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8088959 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Serenella Iovino (0000-0001-5921-9785, University of Turin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 133 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 69-86 |
| Publication date | 2015-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0340-5222 • E-ISSN: 1865-8938 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ang-2015-0006 |
| OpenAlex | W2799696915 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 22 |
In the past years, the agentic and semiotic properties of material reality have been the focus of many areas of research, producing an exuberant "turn to the material" also in the debate about the humanities. This "material turn" is indeed a broad conversation across disciplines, combining physics and sociology, biology and anthropology, ontology and epistemology, feminist theories, archaeology, and geography, just to name a few. The paradigm emerging from this debate prompts not only fresh nonanthropocentric vistas, but also possible "ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world – ways that account for myriad [...] phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal and technological" (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 5). The underlying task of this discourse is that of providing an onto-epistemological framework for non-dichotomous modes to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, matter and mind, nature and culture.A crossroad of scientific and humanistic research by definition, the environmental humanities is the field in which this "turn" received foremost attention. Ecocritical theory responds to this conceptual conversation by heeding material dynamics via an enlargement of its hermeneutical field of application. A material ecocriticism, in other words, investigates matter both in texts and as a text, elaborating a reflection on the way "bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality" (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). Drawing from the philosophical and scientific insights of the new materialisms, this essay explores the main points of material ecocriticism, focusing in particular on the notion of "narrative agency" and on the way interpreting "stories of matter" becomes possible as an ecocritical practice
Agency (philosophy · Conversation · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistic turn · Linguistics · Narrative · Ontology · Semiotics · Sociology · Transformative learning · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Philosophy
Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture
“Grump Mountain”
Águas pós-coloniais em romances angolanos e moçambicanos
Reproducing the majapahit story in Aceh
Toward an Ethological Poetics
This is Not a Photograph of Zuko’
Multisensorial Musings on Miniature Matters
Writing Toward and With
Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities
Indigenous Poetics and Transcultural Ecologies
Bodily Natures
Material Feminisms
How We Became Posthuman
What Do Pictures Want?
Introducing the New Materialisms
Toward a Blue Cultural Studies
Material Ecocriticism
States of Suspension
Theorizing Material Ecocriticism
A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole
Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,25 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |