This essay argues that fermentation offers a historically grounded logic for reading early modern natural philosophy alongside contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence and the boundaries of human agency. Drawing on Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s correspondential cosmology, Paracelsian chymistry, and George Ripley’s alchemy, the essay demonstrates how Renaissance texts frame transformation as slow, relational, and mediated by unseen agencies – processes materially familiar through brewing and bread-making and dramatised across Shakespeare’s works. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is read as a satire of the speculative economies that correspondence thinking generates, while Francis Bacon’s doctrine of the idols diagnoses the cognitive distortions that proliferating correspondence produces when unmoored from method. The essay connects this fermentative imagination to modern accounts of symbiogenesis and biosemiotic agency, proposing yeast as a figure for distributed, emergent intelligence that operates beneath the threshold of perception yet determines the character of the systems it inhabits.
Theodor Storm (1817–1888), a key author of German realism, is internationally renowned for his coastal novellas. This paper examines Journey to a Hallig (Eine Halligfahrt, 1871) as an econarrative that uses the Hallig, a unique type of low-lying tidal island, as a concentrated littoral habitat to explore (anti-)symbiotic forms of human–nonhuman coexistence along the North Sea coast. In Storm’s novella, the coastal shore as well as storm tides are dramatized as forces that expose the precarious and asymmetrical relations between humans, flora, fauna, and water, where life unfolds in unstable alliances with the sea. The analysis highlights how Storm narrates interdependence through dialectics of vulnerability and agency, including moments in which human action itself disrupts ecological processes. It further shows how this symbiotic tension is mirrored aesthetically, with the dynamics of the sea resonating in narrative rhythm, temporal layering, and a semantics of colour. Storm’s text thus inscribes the risks of living with water and offers historical perspectives on coexistence, catastrophe, and ecological vulnerability that remain relevant today.
The article studies “symbiotic terror” as the dynamic interplay between social identities and more-than-human actors within eco-scenarios where humans become hosts for mutated organisms, regarded as a response to the emergent nature of human-nonhuman interactions. The paper envisions “symbiotic terror” via outlining the notions of individual identity and bodily autonomy, creating a sense of horror from the amalgamation of human and nonhuman agencies within the nuclear toxic locality in Kat & Agnes Merikan & Lori A. Witt’s Werewolves of Chernobyl. The article emphasizes “symbiotic terror” for exploring the complex and often frightening relationships between humans, nuclear trauma, and the environment, resonating deep-seated fears about loss of control and contamination. Such a perspective challenges the nuclear narratives on the potential for nature to turn in unpredictable and terrifying ways by emphasizing the long-term genetic impacts of the disaster, creating human and nonhuman entities, and re-valorizing the complex human-environment relationships in the face of crisis and uncertainty.
The paper offers one of the first scholarly examinations of Michael Christie’s Greenwood (2019) as a literary (re)imagining of human–nature symbiosis, interpreted through the lens of ecocriticism. Christie’s eco-apocalyptic, multigenerational saga, whose concentric narrative structure evocatively mirrors the growth rings of a giant Douglas fir, revises contemporary ecocritical discourse on nature-oriented fiction. Spanning more than a century, the novel traces the intertwined destinies of a single family, uncovering their hidden transgressions while celebrating the enduring power of love, sacrifice, and the natural world, particularly the symbolic presence of trees. Throughout the narrative, Christie employs the rhythmic pulse of arboreal life as a central metaphor to illuminate the themes of environmental exploitation, survival, and redemption. An ecocritical reading of Greenwood reveals the author’s strategies for constructing a complex vision of ecological collapse through arboreal imaginaries, offering insights into how the novel conceptualises the environment both as a narrative force and as an ethical framework extending beyond the text itself.
This article examines Min Tanaka’s dance performed in the grounds of Koshikiiwa Temple (2015) as an enactment of extracultural becoming: a transgression of the boundaries of the human condition understood as a ‘cultured’ – that is, individualised, learned, structured, and brain-regulated – mode of existence, separated from the acultural flux of nature. In Tanaka’s septuagenarian body, the physiology of ageing is not resisted or corrected but lived as a willfully accepted departure from culturally enforced regimes of self-regulation. The phenomenological delinking of body and brain emerges here not as loss, but as a condition of transformation. Ageing, decay, and reabsorption of the body in the flux of circulating matter are thus refigured not through denial or sublimation, but as the fulfilment of transgressive impulses that give rise to a liminal mode of creation. This process entails the adoption of a symbiotic – ultimately synthanatic – condition, in which the constraints of cultural individuation are overcome, and the human body re-enters a field of relational, extracultural growth. The dance culminates in a synthanatic acceptance of death, understood not as negation but as reintegration into the continuous flux of biomaterial existence.
