What are you working with at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
I am looking at the affective use of plants and flowers in Japanese women's literature, including graphic novels, from the early 1900s to the contemporary. I begin by studying how flowers and plants were portrayed in Japanese literature and illustrationas a projection of human emotions, a phenomenon which was mostly inspired by Western cultural fashions such as the “flower language” of the Victorian era. This is most evident in early twentieth century shōjo bungaku, girls’ literature, such asYoshiya Nobuko's short story series Hana monogatari (Flower stories), and in girl magazines’ illustrations by artists like Takabatake Kasho and Takehisa Yumeji. I then look at shōjo manga (girl comics) of the 1960s and 1970s, where flowers are a central element of what Deborah Shamoon has described as “emotive backgrounds,” that express metaphorically the characters’ feelings. While their use remains symbolic, due to their sheer amount on the pages the flowers in 1970s manga takes increasing significance, leading to a more recent shift in the new millennium, when flowers and plants are presented as agents that engender affective reactions in characters and by extension in readers. This emerges both in the medium of graphic novels, for example in Hagio Moto's short manga Nanohana (Canola flowers), set in the Fukushima area at the time of the nuclear incident of 2011, and in literature, for example in Ayase Maru's novel Mori ga afureru (The forest brims over), where a woman eats seeds that begin to germinate inside her, turning her body into a forest. My hope is that by examiningthe increasing amount of agency that flowers acquire in these stories, I will be able to devise a theoretical model for examining this kind of complex entanglement of affordances and affective responses, that may be used to explore emotional engagement with the environment in literature beyond the specific Japanese case.
What activity or aspect about Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
I love the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of the project. The word interdisciplinarity is thrown around a lot these days, but often when one looks concretely at something described as interdisciplinary, it is more of a juxtaposition, there isn’t much real interaction between the different methods involved. Of course, making different disciplinary approaches speak to each other is difficult! But with Eco-Emo we have a lot of interaction, and personally it has really opened my mind. We have regular seminars where each of us presents on their research, and because we work in different disciplines as well as on different time periods, from medieval to contemporary, and different geographical areas, from the Nordics to the Middle East to East Asia, whoever is presenting needs to explain a lot of the background, the terminology, the methods, the periodization and so forth. I have found it very helpful to be forced to explain my methods and contexts in a clear and accessible way, and when attending other people’s presentations, I have been inspired to read further into areas relatively far from my own. I had not been reading so broadly since I was a student, and it has been really refreshing.
What do you currently read for pleasure?
I just finished a novel called Eden, by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. It talks about a linguist specialising in disappearing languages who decides to leave her university job, buy a little farmhouse, and plant trees. It is both poetic and humorous, focusing in equal measure on human relations and human-nature interactions. I can’t read Icelandic, so I read it in French translation, which has added a layer of strangeness as the book includes many reflections on Icelandic words and their origin. It was a very enjoyable reading. Now I have started Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count, which focuses on the intertwined lives of four Nigerian women, three of them living in the U.S. and one living in Nigeria, during the covid pandemic. She is one of my favourite authors, I have loved everything that she has written so far, and I hope this one will not disappoint!