Inspired by the theoretical debates about distributed fields of agency and of meaning, the so-called “material turn” sheds its effects also on ecocriticism. Its main conceptual tenet, the agency of matter, has in fact vast implications on the ideas of narrativity and text. If matter is agentic, and endowed with meanings, every material configuration, from bodies to their contexts of living, is “telling,” and therefore can be the object of a critical analysis aimed at discovering its stories, its material and discursive interplays, its place in a “choreography of becoming.” In other words, taking matter as a text, material ecocriticism broadens and enhances the narrative potentialities of reality in terms of an intrinsic performativity of elements. At the same time, it broadens the range of narrative agencies, seeing performativity at work in the thick of things: stories, bodies, landscapes, bacteria, electric grids, quantum entanglements, waste dumps, animal testing, cyborgs, cheese, nuclear sites, oceanic plastic, art, time, and nature. In my presentation I will explore this new dimension of ecocriticism looking at the example of some meaningful narratives about the intermingling of living bodies, social forms, and what, following Bruno Latour, we can call “actants”: “things” or assemblages of things that, in various forms and patterns, interact and interfere with human life, interlacing with the emerging meanings and agencies. In particular, I will concentrate on some recent filmic and literary representation of Naples’ urban waste crisis, “embodied” narratives that show how the “material self” is a crossroads of multiple agencies. This will end up in a provoking question: who is the storyteller of these stories narrated through and across bodies by multiple material-discursive agents, such as toxic waste, sick cells, individual organisms, and social forces? Who is really the “narrating subject,” if things—collectives, assemblages, actants—are narrative agencies?
“Narrative Agency and Storied Matter: Material Ecocriticism and the Speech of Things”.
IOVINO, Serenella
2012-01-01
Abstract
Inspired by the theoretical debates about distributed fields of agency and of meaning, the so-called “material turn” sheds its effects also on ecocriticism. Its main conceptual tenet, the agency of matter, has in fact vast implications on the ideas of narrativity and text. If matter is agentic, and endowed with meanings, every material configuration, from bodies to their contexts of living, is “telling,” and therefore can be the object of a critical analysis aimed at discovering its stories, its material and discursive interplays, its place in a “choreography of becoming.” In other words, taking matter as a text, material ecocriticism broadens and enhances the narrative potentialities of reality in terms of an intrinsic performativity of elements. At the same time, it broadens the range of narrative agencies, seeing performativity at work in the thick of things: stories, bodies, landscapes, bacteria, electric grids, quantum entanglements, waste dumps, animal testing, cyborgs, cheese, nuclear sites, oceanic plastic, art, time, and nature. In my presentation I will explore this new dimension of ecocriticism looking at the example of some meaningful narratives about the intermingling of living bodies, social forms, and what, following Bruno Latour, we can call “actants”: “things” or assemblages of things that, in various forms and patterns, interact and interfere with human life, interlacing with the emerging meanings and agencies. In particular, I will concentrate on some recent filmic and literary representation of Naples’ urban waste crisis, “embodied” narratives that show how the “material self” is a crossroads of multiple agencies. This will end up in a provoking question: who is the storyteller of these stories narrated through and across bodies by multiple material-discursive agents, such as toxic waste, sick cells, individual organisms, and social forces? Who is really the “narrating subject,” if things—collectives, assemblages, actants—are narrative agencies?
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