Program: Eco-Emotions on Air

 

 

 

 

Abstract

Building on a few methodological premises that stem from elemental ecocriticism (Böhme 1996; Cohen/Duckert 2015), as well as from Paracelsus’ idea of the four elements as «matrices [...] from whom all things of nature emerge» and which «shape the language of nature» (Kramer 2017: 7), this paper focuses on German writer and poet Durs Grünbein’s poetic collection Lob des Taifuns (“Praise of the Typhoon”, 2008) with the aim of highlighting the central role that air plays, both thematically and formally, in the collection, where the aerial element not only shapes a sophisticated po(i)etic system but also carries ethical and educational implications, evident in intentions through Grünbein’s essayistic work (2003, 2007) and his engagement with modern sciences (Owen 2001; McIsaac 2016). Specifically, this paper seeks to demonstrate how, in Grünbein’s poetry, air acts as a literary manifestation of his response to contemporary environmental issues, catalysing poetic inspiration and undergoing transformative metamorphosis that prompts the poet himself into the act of writing. Seen as poetic coagulant, air ultimately symbolises both the poetic journey and the writing process, reflecting the poet’s environmental and sociocultural influences through the transformative power of poetry (Grünbein 2009).

 

 

 

This paper aims to explore the interplay of wind, water, and eco-emotions in Amy Liptrot's The Outrun (2016) and Victoria Whitworth's Swimming with Seals (2017), focusing on themes of movement and (in)accessibility in contemporary life writing set in the Orkney Islands. Published roughly one year apart, both memoirs focus on life on the Orkney Islands, specifically the enjoyments, opportunities, and challenges of engaging with nature on the Islands. In particular, two elements broaden as well as restrict their movement: the air (wind and the weather) and the water (sea). This research will investigate the concept of eco-emotions, considering how Liptrot and Whitworth articulate their emotional responses to the broadening and restrictions of the air and the water, their connection, and their impacts on mental health. The paper will also address the themes of movement and (in)accessibility, both in a literal sense—through the physical landscapes of the Orkney Islands—and metaphorically, in terms of the authors' journeys toward self-discovery and healing. In addition, as memoirs are human-focused, this paper will discuss questions and possibilities of autobiographical writing within the Anthropocene. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With invited artists: 

 

 

 

 

In recent years, literary and historical studies of saints’ lives have emphasized the traditional and memorial aspects of medieval miracle stories to mitigate questions of fictionality and credulity, while art historical studies focus on the dazzling artistic beauty of later medieval reliquaries that  visually aggrandize earthly remains to evoke the sublime beauty of paradise. However, a close, comparative analysis of the historical, hagiographical and exegetical writings of Bede (673-735) against his sources and later materials reveals that his accounts of miracles, saints, and relics operate differently: they “emphasize the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world” (Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures 2). 

There’s very little glitter in Bede’s writings; rather, Bede entangles natural, elemental materials with holy remains and living people, so that mundane, unadorned substances and media, like earth, water, light and air articulate the interconnection between the mundane and the divine, evoking fear, awe and wonder. Looking specifically at miracles involving air as a medium for light and sound, or as a force (like winds) this essay examines the ways in which such miracles illuminate emotion and affect in ways that are not liminal, but in and of this earth — which takes on a different role than some received Christian notions of hierarchy and dominion suggest.  

 

This paper looks at the passages of winds (defined by Isidore as aria agitata in his Etymologies), as well as the sea tossed and turned by winds, in Felix Fabri’s fifteenth-century travelogue known as Evagatorium. For late medieval travellers to the Holy Land, sea routes are unavoidable; the unpredictable winds on the sea accompany them all the time, intricately entangled with their life and death, whilst also emotively arousing theological rumination and literary inspiration from religious travelers.

I argue that the passages of winds and sea jointly convey Fabri’s theological expression and subjective voices. Depicted oftentimes as moving in tandem with each other, winds and sea in Evagatorium are narrated as not only physically symbiotic with human beings, but also hierarchically superior to them. The two elements are portrayed to have the agency to determine human fortune and misfortune, deified to embody many features conventionally attributed to God by medieval Christian theologians. Fabri writes about winds and sea with extensive reference to foregoing intellectual historical sources, scholasticism, as well as mysticism (notably apophatic thoughts of Henry Suso and Nicolas of Cusa), thereby consciously capitalising on the entrenched cultural-conceptual metaphors of the two naturalistic existence in service of his complicated theological self-expression. Curiously enough, while water and air emotively trigger emotions here, they also receive intersubjective, philosophising narrative in Evagatorium under human manipulation. This calls for more attention to the degree of the involvement of human consciousness in medieval nature writing from a cognitive perspective.

 

 

Despite the generally pejorative connotations of clouds and fogs in the European Middle Ages, it is also possible to find an alternative strand of thinking associated with Christian negative theology in which the obscure interior of a cloud is given a divine and contemplative value. Moses' entry into the cloud on top Mount Sinai to receive instructions from God (Exodus) acts as the point of origin for this evaluation. References to this paradigmatic ascent and entry subsequentially structure the writing of Pseudo-Dionysius, Richard of Saint-Victor, the Middle English Cloud of Unknowing author, and Nicholas of Cusa.

After briefly explicating the role of the cloud within these medieval apophatic writers, I will turn to a twenty-first century theological corpus where this image makes a surprising return, now harnessed to contemporary planetary crises and concerns. Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2015) re-envisions the Dionysian cloud of 'alter knowing' as a fundamental tool for our present time as we confront daunting political and environmental impossibilities. 'This is a cloud', she writes, 'that must be entered if we are to get through it'. In the second half of this paper, I will comment upon the implications of repurposing this ancient meteorological trope to embody hope and possibility within an unpredictable planetary present.

 

In this paper, I will focus on one of the main sub-categories of Air in Old Norse literature, namely winds and storms, and trace how their significance and meaning is described in various Old Norse sources. I will compare sources retelling of pagan cosmology, such as skaldic and Eddic poetry and Snorra Edda and sources that present Christian ideas about the origin and nature of winds, such as Elucidarius, Konungs skuggsjá, among others. The comparison demonstrates that winds and storms are important elements in both creation myths and that they figurate in both cognitive ecologies. However, there are also significant differences in the way winds and storms operate in these two cosmological systems, suggesting that air (as everything else), is highly contingent on the cultural ecology it fills. 

 

 

 

The twelfth century in medieval Europe is often referred to as the ‘encyclopedic age’. One of the most influential (though little-studied) encyclopedias of the period, the Imago mundi of Honorius Augustodunensis, describes the physical world in the first of its three Books. This encyclopedia represents accepted knowledge of the time, presented in uncomplicated Latin, and in a simple organized form, providing easy access to the information, and contributing to its medieval popularity. (More than a hundred medieval manuscripts survive of this text, not counting early printed editions). The first book of the encyclopedia—the only part of the text translated into most medieval Western European vernaculars—is structured according to the four elements. The section on ‘earth’ is dedicated to a geographical description of the (inhabited) world; the section on ‘water’ to the rivers and oceans; the section on ‘air’ to aerial phenomena including winds and tempests; and the section on ‘fire’ to astronomy. The present paper will introduce the way in which the ‘Air’ section of the encyclopedia is constructed. The goal is to understand how Honorius defined ‘Air’, and thus what ‘Air’ meant for his readers and for those who later adapted the encyclopedia into other European languages.

 

 

 

Parini used the very instrument of the Enlightenment débat, opening up the “useful” (according to the ancient Horatian principle) to poetic themes; responding to the thematic cue -the air- launched by the Accademia dei Trasformati he composed the ode La salubrità dell'aria in 1759 (published in 1791: Odi, II) on environmental pollution in Milan. In a striking topicality and ecological sensibility, for the first time in Europe a poet made room for air as a determining factor of a city's quality of life, at the same time as the first descriptions of bad smells (as in Paris) and the 19th-century architectural, medical and philosophical studies on the salubrity and circulation of air in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. This type of literary denunciation on the air is part of a new environmental sensibility on the 18th-century European continent, close to the present one in terms of the warning of air pollution and the kind of thinking that animated the debate. In addition, in a more global way it represents a significant stage in the development of the relationship between man and nature (currently approached in Italy by ecological criticism of literature) beyond anthropocentrism.

 

Edvard Lia, The Arctic University of Norway

 

In this paper, I read Spahr’s respiratory ecopoetry together with the philosophy of Hans Jonas to articulate a respiratory responsibility. In what is arguably his most cited passage, taken from The Imperative of Responsibility (1984), Jonas detects the origin of responsibility in “the most familiar sight: the newborn, whose mere breathing uncontradictably addresses an ought to the world around, namely, to take care of him. Look and you know.” Jonas has been taken to task by his critics for collapsing the is-ought distinction and for substituting rational argumentation with an appeal to emotions. But what if such an emotional appeal is the core of respiratory responsibility? Answering this question is what animates my reading of Spahr’s respiratory ecopoetry and Jonas’s philosophy of breath.

 

Knut Hamsun’s travelogue I Æventyrland (1903), translated into English as In Wonderland, describes a train journey from St. Petersburg to Baku carried out in September 1899. The eastern end point of the journey is the Nobel Brothers’ oil company by the Caspian Sea where the traveler-writer is confronted with a new energy regime that stresses his sensory apparatus in peculiar ways. While most Hamsun scholars have paid attention to genre issues and how the travelogue depicts the cultural contrast between east and west, this paper interrogates an understudied environmental topic in the book: the oil encounter mediated as an olfactory concern. What are the aesthetic implications of oil intermingling with the air one breathes?