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.” This panel will address these issues following the theoretical as well as analytical pathways of a research methodology that we propose to call "material ecocriticism." 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.
Materia Loquens: Conversations on Material Ecocriticism
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.” This panel will address these issues following the theoretical as well as analytical pathways of a research methodology that we propose to call "material ecocriticism." 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.
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