Eco-ekphrasis (Rippl)

Question 1

Environmental Humanities

Answer 1

In a nutshell: the Environmental Humanities emphasizes the important role the humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences can play not just in producing solutions to environmental problems but in understanding how those problems arose and reframing them to improve environmental outcomes.

Question 2

Ekphrasis, a reminder

Answer 2

• the staging of point of view, moments of looking, the gaze and the production of friction by the reading process
• the visual, is evoked via words, via verbal descriptions and intermedial references
• subcategory of intermediality
• “verbal representation of visual representation” (James A. W. Heffernan)

Question 3

Ekphrasis – Defining Features and Functions

Answer 3

• Renate Brosch’s focus is on the cognitive effects and functions of ekphrasis that include heightened visualization and the unsettling of “conventional schemata of representation” (2015): As a trigger for cognitive participation, ekphrasis influences reception processes in important ways – attention management and heightened creative reader participation, which reinforces “comprehension, memory and emotional response” (Brosch 2015).
• Birgit Neumann puts a spotlight on the commemorative functions of ekphrasis: By linking different media, ekphrasis becomes central in working through visual memories and to continually transform, re-interpret and re-member past knowledge (2015). This is particularly important for eco-ekphrases and the role they play for ecological knowledge and memory.

Question 4

Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux’s definition of ekphrasis

Answer 4

• she considers an ekphrastic poem as “the poem that addresses a work of art” (2008)
• “Looking is not, never has been, ethically neutral […]. […] The inherently social dynamics of
  ekphrasis and its possibilities for polyvocality made it especially attractive to a postmodernism alive to the multiplicity of the lyric subject and to racial, ethnic and gender differences.” (2008)
• Loizeaux further argues that ekphrasis “often stages an engagement with the foreign”, which is why “[t]he ekphrastic poem is all about […] otherness, and about how one engages it. […] The inherently social dynamics of ekphrasis and its possibilities for polyvocality made it especially attractive to a postmodernism alive to the multiplicity of the lyric subject and to racial, ethnic and gender differences.” (2008)

Question 5

Greening Ekphrasis: Eco-ekphrasis in the Anthropocene

Answer 5

• “intermedial ecocriticism” (Bruhn 2021)
• Eco-ekphrasis: the verbal evocation of, or reference to, a (fictive or actual) work of art or artefact in a literary text that discusses ecological issues (Rippl 2019)
• Eco-ekphrases epitomize the highly politicized use of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry and narrative fiction together with its interest in questions of class, gender, and race.
• As a mode of writing that showcases visual epistemological frameworks (Neumann and Rippl 2020), eco-ekphrasis takes on important cultural-critical, ethical, and socio-political functions.
• Eco-ekphrases negotiate the ecological crises and uncanny events of the Anthropocene – climate change, water contamination, biodiversity loss and human-caused extinction
• They invite readers to reconsider their ideological assumptions, affective commitments, and ethical values.

Question 6

Examples of contemporary Anglophone eco-poets

Answer 6

• A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin in the USA
• Don McKay and Ross Berlo in Canada
• Alice Oswald, Simon Armitage, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Pascale Petit in Britain
• Eric Mahon in Ireland
• Margaret Atwood, “Midway Island Albatross”, poem 4 from her “Plasticene Suite”, Dearly: New Poems

Question 7

Examples of Eco-ekphrasis in contemporary novels

Answer 7

• Margaret Atwood “The Year of the Flood”
• Don DeLillo “Underworld”
• Alexandra Kleeman “Something New Under the Sun”
• Richard Powers “Bewilderment”
• Richard Powers “The Overstory”
• Jeff Vandermeer “Hummingbird Salamander”
• Barbara Kingsolver “Flight Behavior”
• James Bradley “Clade”

Question 8

Conclusion to eco-ekphrasis

Answer 8

• With their potential to unsettle anthropocentrism, eco-ekphrases and descriptions of natural environments, play an important part in reshaping the ecological imaginary and readers’ attitudes toward the natural world.
• Even if the eco-ekphrases we discussed do not fully replace anthropocentric perspectives, they still “destabilize […] and counterweigh […]” human exceptionalism (Spengler), and thus facilitate a new appreciation of non-human life and “a reconceptualization of anthropocentric ideas of time and space” (Spengler).
• In complex revisionary processes, descriptions of nature and eco-ekphrases rework established ways of seeing and witnessing, and in so doing, undo the visual basis that made possible the naturalization of hierarchies between humans and the more-than-human world in the first place.
• Significantly, it is their intermedial aesthetics that establishes visual contact zones, interrelations and networks between humans and the more-than-human world, thus opening-up a zone of creative transformation and re-vision of established orders, thus expanding the field of existing epistemic, ethical, and affective possibilities.
• Ekphrasis, understood as a conceptual space for negotiating the downsides of unsustainable actions, is also a means of presenting sustainable visions and alternative ways of living.
• By creating intense emotional atmospheres, eco-ekphrastic writers unsettle anthropocentric perspectives and have succeeded in finding adequate intermedial literary forms to express in novel ways what is hard to imagine and even harder to describe (Greenwald Smith).