Earth, world, text: On the (im) possibility of ecopoiesis

New Literary History

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 427-442

  Rigby, Kate ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950677030     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2004.0045     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Dominic Head, "The(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism," in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed Books, 1998), 27
2. Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990)
3. quoted in Head, "The (Im) possibility of Ecocriticism," 29
4. Robyn Eckersley, "Beyond Human Racism," Environmental Values 7, no. 2 (1998): 165-82
5. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
6. Quoted in Head, "The(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism," 33
7. Head, "The (Im) possibility of Ecocriticism," 37
8. Jonathan Bate, The Song of theEarth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
9. Bate, Song of the Earth, 283
10. See, for example, Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
11. and Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993)
12. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. and intro. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1996), 320
13. Heidegger, "Question Concerning Technology," 321
14. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; London: Verso, 1979)
15. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt, (1970; London: Routledge, 1989)
16. Krell asserts, "the suppression of the political and of praxis by poiesis and the work of art ought to disturb us. If thinking perdures beyond or beneath the distinction between theory and practice (see Reading V), does it also remain untouched by the apparent split between poiesis and praxis?" (Basic Writings, 310)
17. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. and trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 149-50
18. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," 150
19. Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" Poetry, Language, Thought, 89-142
20. Heidegger, "What are Poets For?" 117
21. Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, trans. R. Lilly (1986; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 63
22. Michael Peters and Ruth Irwin, in another recent reprise to Bate's reading of Heidegger's ecopoetics, also note that "when it comes to the status of humanity in relation to other forms of life, Heidegger retains the prejudices of his times." "Earthsongs: Ecopoetics, Heidegger and Dwelling," The Trumpeter 18, no. 1 (2002), http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/ content/v18.1/peters-irwin.htm (accessed February 1, 2003), 8 of 14
23. Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" 132
24. Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfüllingen: Noske, 1979), 164
25. Heidegger, "Hebel - der Hausfreund" (Hebel - the House Friend), in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 1910 - 1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 145
26. Heidegger, "Der Feldweg" (The Country Path), in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 89
27. Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), ix
28. On the question of the status of human language, as well as on the question of the embodied dimension of human subjectivity, ecocritics might be better served by Merleau-Ponty than by Heidegger, especially in light of David Abram's inspiring ecophilosophical rereading of the former in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. (New York: Vintage, 1997)
29. One ecocritic who has already followed this path is Leonard Skigaj in Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). As I will go on to discuss, however, the continuity of human speaking with that of the more-than-human world is only part of the story. It is also necessary to acknowledge the specificity and negativity of human language, and, in this respect, I suspect that Merleau-Ponty might be as much in need of "correction" as Heidegger
30. David Rothenberg, "No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess's Concrete Contents," in Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology, ed. Eric Katz, Andrew Light, David Rothenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 163
31. On the relevance of the Bakhtinian theory of "dialogics" to ecological (and specifically, ecofemiuist) criticism, see Patrick Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995)
32. On Rothenberg's own work, see, for example, Sudden Music: Improvisation, Sound, Nature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002) (book plus CD)
33. See Jacqueline Millner's discussion of Nankin's "Sacred Theory of the Wave," in Miliner, "Afterword: Perspective on the Perspecta," in Uncertain Ground: Essays Between Art & Nature, ed. Martin Thomas (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999), 173-74
34. Robert Gray, "On a Forestry Trail," New Selected Poems (Sydney: Duff)7 and Snellgrove, 1998), 239
35. Gray, "Very Early," New Selected Poems, 159
36. G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe I, ed. K. Duesing and H. Kimmerle (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1975), 20
37. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Basic Writings, 174, 172, 175
38. Earth in this sense is perhaps not so ver)' different from what Maurice Merleau-Ponty came to call the "flesh of the world." See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Leford, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 248
39. "Projective saying is saying, which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world" (Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," 199)
40. Haar, Song of the Earth, 123-24
41. In my attempted theorization of an ecopoetics of negativity, I am indebted to conversations with my colleague Kevin Hart, who coined the term "poetics of the negative" in an essay on theology and literary theory, "The Poetics of the Negative," in Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 281-340
42. Jean François Lyotard, "Ecology as Discourse of the Secluded," The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocnticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000), 135-38
43. Yves Bonnefoy, "Lifting Our Eyes from the Page" (1988), Critical Inquiry 16 (Summer 1990): 794-806
44. Bonnefoy, "Lifting Our Eyes," 796, 801
45. Jean-Louis Chrétien, "Retrospection," The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 122. Chrétien's work on beauty is L'efroi du beau (Paris: Cerf, 1987)
46. Chrétien's critique of Heidegger's philosophy of language is developed in The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (1992; New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), especially 30-31
47. Chrétien, "Retrospection," 122
48. Bonnefoy, "Lifting Our Eyes," 806
49. Chrétien, "Retrospection," 128
50. John Clare, 'The Mores," John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 196