Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Journal Article Containers of Care: Cardboard and the Corrugated Construction of War Get access Minh Huynh Vu Minh Huynh Vu E-mail: minh.vu@yale.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2548-7006 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isad058, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad058 Published: 30 August 2023 Article history Editorial decision: 17 August 2023 Received: 17 August 2023 Accepted: 18 August 2023 Published: 30 August 2023

Journal Article Lesbian Ferality: Bertha Harris’s Confessions of Cherubino as Disturbance Literature Get access Kara M Russell Kara M Russell krussel3@olemiss.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isad030, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad030 Published: 04 July 2023 Article history Received: 03 April 2023 Editorial decision: 28 May 2023 Accepted: 08 June 2023 Published: 04 July 2023

Journal Article “A Quiet Statement That It Was ‘Damp’”: Eco-racial Dominance and Black Women’s Water Resilience in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl Get access Christin Marie Taylor Christin Marie Taylor ctaylor4@su.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isad068, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad068 Published: 03 October 2023 Article history Received: 17 July 2022 Revision received: 10 August 2023 Editorial decision: 16 September 2023 Published: 03 October 2023

Journal Article African Ecocriticism, Interspecies Relationship, and Kyuka Lilymjok’s Twilight for a Vulture Get access John Olorunshola Kehinde, John Olorunshola Kehinde graduate student in the Department of English, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria johnvitoke@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sule Emmanuel Egya Sule Emmanuel Egya professor of African literature and culture, and director of the Centre for Arts and Indigenous Studies at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isad004, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad004 Published: 08 February 2023 Article history Received: 23 September 2022 Revision received: 02 December 2022 Editorial decision: 14 January 2023 Accepted: 21 January 2023 Published: 08 February 2023

In the current climate crisis, we count more than ever on art and literature.1 Theorists and critics repeatedly emphasize the role of literature and imagination in overcoming an impasse in climate change communication through science and data.2 In genres like speculative fiction and science fiction, or, for convenience, the umbrella genre/category of climate fiction, writers already narrativize climate change and speculate on its futures.3 Yet, there is much critique and contestation on how climate fiction may properly respond to the climate crisis, what affects it may create, and whether it could move the public to act. Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra have done extensive research on climate change representation in contemporary culture. One major frame for representing climate change in their surveys is, expectedly, a future dystopia or apocalypse; Johns–Putra writes: “Overwhelmingly, climate change appears in novels as part of a futuristic dystopian and/or postapocalyptic setting” (269).4 Climate change here refers to social upheavals, civilization collapse, abandoned cities, violence, authoritarian rule, along with environmental degradation, extinctions, and loss of land. For many commentators, however, this representation seems to be more of a problem than a solution. These novels are said to “evade most of the present-day moral [and] political dilemmas by simply jumping ahead to some far more straightforward depiction of future disaster,” and they “inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space” (Clark 78-79; Morton 103–04). They are alarmist, or they rather commodify apocalypse as entertainment (Hoggert 261; Swyngedouw 219). They invest in the “charisma of crisis,” and they “contribute to negative public perceptions of environmentalism” (LeMenager 225; Seymour 54).

According to recent biological measurements, the plant kingdom is the most dominant of the six kingdoms of life (Thompson). Plants account for eighty percent of the total biomass on earth and are crucial to almost all ecosystems, supporting humans and other animals by providing shelter, oxygen, and food (Jose, Wu, and Kamoun). Yet most human beings seem to suffer from “plant blindness,” an inability to notice plants and recognize their importance to the biosphere and appreciate their unique biological and aesthetic features (Wandersee and Schussler 85). Until recently this ignorance towards the plant kingdom was striking, not least within the humanities. As humans’ irreversible impact on our planet’s ecosystems has been broadly recognized in recent years, this situation is now changing. While philosophers such as Matthew Hall, Michael Marder, and Jeffrey T. Nealon have critically examined the status and role of plants in Western philosophical tradition and language, even the literary field has seen an intensified engagement with the vegetal sphere and its functions in fictional worlds and narratives. While ecocriticism has been broadly concerned with “the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” the more specified field of critical plant studies may be described as efforts to acknowledge the vegetal spheres of literature by opening up “new ways of reading in relation to plants, trees, crops and how they are imagined” (Glotfelty xviii, Woodward and Lemmer 24). Although such plant-oriented readings are now becoming more common even in research on children’s literature, quantitative research on the role of plants in fiction remains minimal. To gain more precise data on how plants are represented in literature, systematic surveys of large corpora are required.

In 1998, C.D. Wright set out to visit three Louisiana prisons with photographer Deborah Luster: Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), East Carroll Prison Farm, and Louisiana State Women’s Correctional Institute (St. Gabriel). The volume of documentary poetry that emerged from these visits is not an overtly abolitionist text, but it does share Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s conviction that the modern US prison system “achieve[s] a simple thing”: it “enclose[s] people in situations where they are expected, and in many ways compelled, to sicken and to die” (242). One Big Self: An Investigation invites readers into racialized carceral ecologies overdetermined by “forms and patterns that coalesce into premature death,” as Wright documents her journey both inside the razor wire and through the nearby petro-industrial corridor known as Cancer Alley (Gilmore 242). In “Stripe for Stripe,” the short essay that begins the volume, Wright describes the book as an attempt to “unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time” (xiv)—a “real feel” she wants to make “travel right up the body” of her reader (xiv). As I write these words, more than two million people—overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor—are imprisoned inside incarcerating facilities in the US, where they are disproportionately exposed to extreme heat and other effects of climate change, contaminated water, and polluted air and soil from neighboring mines, dumps, and toxic industries. The carceral system in the USA not only serves to warehouse people who have been made into the disposable “detritus of capitalism” but also actively continues what Katherine McKittrick calls the plantation logics of chattel slavery—a set of race-making and place-making practices that extract life from some bodies and some landscapes for others’ profit (Davis 16). Wright’s effort to “lay out the real feel of hard time” remains an urgent call—in Wright’s words, “a summons”—for the un-incarcerated among us to not look away from conditions of social and physical death (xv).1

Bright orange banners recently sprang up along the lemon orchards lining the hills where I live, in a quiet Santa Barbara exurb. The signs exhort passersby to “Save Our Citrus!” and direct the curious to a web site, californiacitrusthreat.org, which explains that California citrus trees are threatened by the non-native Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny wasp that can infect trees with a fatal, bacteria-borne disease called Huanglongbing (literally, yellow dragon sickness). As with most “invasive” species, however, such an account raises more questions than it answers: how and when did these insects get here? Who is to blame, if blame we must—the wasps, the bacteria, or the humans who introduced them? Is it genius or hubris when entomologists exert “biological control” by releasing Tamarixia radiata, a known parasitoid of the psyllid in Asia, into California orchards “at no cost”? These are exactly the sorts of entities and relationships, some purposeful, most unplanned, that pervade Feral Atlas and its beautiful, but also sobering, catalog of our contemporary social and ecological realities.

In the past decade, an increasing number of novelists have undertaken the task of narrativizing and representing climate change. In both the academy and beyond, this undertaking has often been theorized not only as representational, but also as motivation to a “wider and deeper climate consciousness” (Schneider-Mayerson 474) in an overtly political and pedagogical project (Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Rigby; Siperstein). Several theorists have suggested that imagining future scenarios such as climate change through fiction may be more effective as a communicative strategy, because of fiction’s capacity to “provide a personal viewpoint” (Pahl and Bauer 157), to enable reflection on a reader’s own “commitments and concerns” (Miall and Kuiken 351), and to ‘augment everyday cognition’ (Oatley 618). Similar sentiments echo in the literary market, as evidenced by the British writer Nina Allen, who noted that, celebrating the achievements of Cynan Jones’ 2018 novel Stillicide, many recent climate fictions might be characterized by their efforts to “imagine the effects of climate at both the global and personal level” (2019). Under such paradigms, the power of climate fiction is located in its capacity to breach the gap between the expected social realism of contemporary litera ture—and its common focalization through individual experience—with the spectacular, world bending realities of climate crisis.

Questions of activism and ethics have accompanied ecopoetic scholarship since the earliest articulations of the field: What can poetry do to solve environmental crises, and why does it warrant attention in an era of increasing (and increasingly dangerous) environmental change? While variations on these questions appear throughout ecocriticism, they are especially prominent in recent scholarship that explicitly broadens definitions of ecopoetry and ecopoetic methodologies beyond obviously ecological or activist content.1 The apologies for poetry’s importance in response to these questions often foreground new or renewed awareness: Ecopoetry arranges language so as to reveal hard-to-perceive aspects of the material world, or to render it in unexpected ways.2 This awareness can, at best, “nudge consciousness to a more ecologically ethical state, which in turn shapes behavior” (Knickerbocker 17–18). Even when ecopoetry “aspires to more than grim consciousness-raising,” however, there remains a “hope that [ecopoets’] visions can help us use our...

Literary scholars working on environmental topics are often confronted with the suggestion that literature should translate science to wide audiences or convince deniers with appealing plots and “relatable” characters. The authors gathered in this strong new collection resist the tropes of communication, translation, and persuasion so enduringly fascinating to the administrative class. Instead they offer a series of analyses focused on the positions we take toward texts in an era of climate breakdown. How should we read, while the world burns—and why? As the contents of the volume bear out, the concept of close reading can authorize what turns out to be an array of practices, and its metaphor of proximity (“close”) could well be switched out for others. The essays suggest good reading might be considered spatially (“deep”), temporally (“slow”), or physically, either with icy remove (“distant”), or an erotic frisson (“intimate”). It might engage historical “context” or focus...

Porque sé el nombre del pájaro, lo veo. —Carmen Camacho In Artefactos—a book published in 1972 which was not in fact a book, but a box of postcards—Chilean “antipoet” Nicanor Parra included the image of four fraught-faced men exclaiming: “In the name of God, what flowers are those?!” The only calm-looking character in the drawing replies: “Water lilies” (Parra 397).1 This “artifact” alludes to a well-known anecdote about Spanish modernist2 poet Francisco Villaespesa, who once, as he walked through Madrid’s Parque del Retiro with fellow poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, is supposed to have pointed to a pond and asked the name of the flowers covering it. His friend answered, with disdain, something on the lines of “they’re the water lilies your poems are so full of.” Villaespesa’s ignorance is revealing in two ways: firstly, because since the days of Modernism many poets...

Close readings in the field of ecocriticism reveal enormous efforts by persistent ecophilosophers and creative literary figures for saving the planet from its doomed devastation. Nevertheless, Bahar Davary observes that literary and critical environmental works in academia are “heavily Euro-American. There has been little mention or recognition of those who are engaged in the struggle in the rest of the world” (12). Current environmentalism needs to embrace the entire globe with its varied ideologies in search of appropriate solutions. This article offers a unified body of Islamic thought that proposes global solutions for nature deterioration. Islam introduces ideological alternatives to overriding Western mindsets out of the common belief that the solution to ecological degradation resides in ideological change. In addition, the environmental dilemma as a spiritual crisis necessitates a return to spirituality and religious discourse. Lawrence Buell proposes that the expansion of understanding of the rightful ecocritical canon requires “encompass[ing] nothing less than all the literatures of the world, with critics throughout the world [which] is still in its early stages” (92). The current study answers his call through introducing Islamic ecocritical theory to the study of literature. Islamic thought is based on primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include the Qur’an and the Sunnah.1 They have a complete body of green verses and Prophetic sayings that tackle nature and shape its relationship to humankind. Secondary sources are firmly rooted in primary sources and encompass: consensus, analogy, juristic preference, public interest, inference, reason, and local custom. They can play a vital role in laying an Islamic environmental jurisprudence that faces nature subjugation. Primary and secondary sources of Islamic thought form an ideal foundation for the literary analysis of nature writings. Integrating Islam in ecocriticism is appropriately labeled Islamecocriticism.

Li Qingzhao (李清照), born in Jinan (濟南), Shandong Province, China, in 1084, in the time of the Song dynasty (960–1276 CE), is one of China’s most popular poets, celebrated mostly for her ci-(詞) form poetry, or song lyrics.1 In recent decades, Li has received more serious critical attention from Chinese Literature scholars—namely, Zheng Chengduo (鄭振鐸), Kang Zheng (康震), Lin Zeng Wen (林增文), Jiang Han Chun, Jiang Han Sen (姜漢椿, 姜漢森), and, foremost, Xu Beiwen (徐北文).2 As those scholars amply point out, Li’s achievements with the ci-form tradition match or outdo the efforts of her contemporaries. Critical interest in the formal qualities of Li’s ci-form poetry inclusive of issues of translation and other formal and textual concerns also has expanded to include attention to the role that gender plays in Li’s poetry. Scholars persuasively argue that Li’s ci-form poems constitute and forward powerful critical connections...

Hermann Hesse’s first novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), begins with the protagonist describing the landscapes that surround his Alpine hamlet, Nimikon, from the forests, the lake, and the clouds to the “sloped luminous meadows” and “precipitous mountains” (1). Peter’s descriptions of his home place illustrate a knowledge of biological detail, an awe for nature’s power, and a love of beauty found in the natural world. As a child, Peter becomes the village’s goatherd, and he notes: On one of the slopes where I usually drove my beasts was a sheltered nook overgrown with cobalt-blue genetians and bright-red saxifrage. In all the world this was my favorite spot. I could not see the village from there, and only a narrow, gleaming strip of lake was visible across the rocks, but the flowers glowed in fresh, laughing colors, the sky hung like a canopy over needle-sharp peaks, and the tinkling goat bells mingled...

Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses, and Melancholia Angelo Monaco Angelo Monaco Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isab017, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab017 Published: 04 March 2021 Article history Received: 29 June 2019 Revision received: 03 January 2021 Editorial decision: 12 February 2021 Accepted: 18 February 2021 Published: 04 March 2021

In the 2008 book The Earth After Us, Jan Zalasiewicz proposes a thought-experiment that lays strikingly bare the effect of the concept of the Anthropocene—the geologic epoch in which humans act as a terrestrial force and the planet figures as a human artifact—upon visual culture. He asks us to imagine “[t]he earth in a post-human future, many millions of years hence, being re-explored” (Zalasiewicz 1).1 In this speculative future, when the planet falls under the gaze of an alien species, Zalasiewicz urges us to wonder, “What would … explorers … find of our own, long-vanished human empire?” (1). How will humanity’s geological footprint appear? The ostensible purpose of Zalasiewicz’s inquiry is to inspire activism to thwart the possibility that humans will one day “poison the planet, foul our own earthly nest, cause ecological mayhem, [and] produc[e] an environmental grande crise” (2). However, he incites his readers to...