Ecological Narratives across Space and Time: Five Sketches for an Eco-Mapping of European Literary Tradition

Colloquium
Paola Ferrandi,  Viviana Santovito,  Serena Sapienza,  Luca Baruffa,  Chiara Maciocci  

As an interdisciplinary field, Environmental Humanities offers a wide variety of methodological tools capable of framing the relationship between the human and non-human worlds. In this context, fulfilling those requirements necessary for interpreting the cultural representation of nature, literature plays a pivotal role in exploring the connection between the human dimension and the natural environment. Although ecocritical literary studies have become one of the most productive paradigms in literature and culture departments worldwide, there is still an irreducible difference of all forms of ecological thinking that need to be explored, studied, and analysed due to their embeddedness in specific experiential, linguistic, and cultural contexts. For instance, it can be argued that the discourse around nature has been integral to transnational literature since its earliest stages, revealing a deep connection between human history and the natural world regardless of geopolitical borders. Drawing inspiration from several branches of ecocriticism, (e.g., material ecocriticism, literary animal studies, sound- and landscape studies, and queer ecology) the authors of this panel propose five case studies that aim to explore how ecocriticism serves efficiently as a methodological tool to investigate literary texts both diachronically and synchronically. Starting from nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors such as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Knut Hamsun, Karl Heinrich Waggerl, Elias Canetti, and Paul Celan, the analysis will culminate in the works of contemporary writers like Christoph Ransmayr, Alexei V. Ivanov, and Kim De l’Horizon, with the goal of framing an ecologically conceived literary landscape of Europe across various historical periods.