Session: 1d
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.10
Chair: Celandine Fleur Seuren
Lúcia Bentes, “Conflict, Domination, and Resistance: The Wind as a Nonhuman Force in Sarah Hall’s Helm”
In light of current ecological and climate changes, and considering that the relationship between humans and nature has long been defined by “conflict and antagonism since Antiquity” (CFP), this paper examines how the wind, as a nonhuman element, is imagined in Helm by Sarah Hall (August 2025). Specifically, it explores how the wind perceives itself—or himself, when personified—and its shifting role in relation to human beings. The analysis focuses on two dimensions:
- the wind as a male force, both dominating and destructive: “Helm enjoys the feeling of agency, of urgency, playing with Helmself to arouse desire for great, wreaking, havoc-making release, surging from a sky orifice, down the mountain, flooding the valley with noise and velocity” (Hall 2025, 6).
- the wind as furious and vengeful: “Hurricane Helm (the hand of God). Wind speed 73–83, phenomenal damage and wide-scale loss of life, Eden reconfigured biblically” (Hall 2025, 157).
Through these perspectives, the paper highlights how symbolic personifications of the wind reflect broader cultural imaginaries of power, gender, and the human–nature relationship. I argue that this anthropomorphism expresses the wind’s agency and forms of political and social resistance against humans. Helm gives voice to a nonhuman force, presenting it as an intelligent being that has generally remained invisible, effectively conveying an awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on nature.
Bio: Born and raised in Germany, Lúcia Bentes has a bachelor degree in German, English and Portuguese and completed her traineeship as a secondary school teacher. She earned her doctoral degree (Ph.D) at the New University of Lisbon (2017). She has published on interdisciplinary topics. Her research interests include Children’s and Youth Literature, Contemporary Literature, Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities. She is an independent researcher and a German and English teacher in Lisbon (Portugal).
Christian Schmitt-Kilb (University of Rostock), “If It Happens, Helm Isn’t Sorry: Climate Breakdown as Transhistorical Human–Nonhuman Relationship in Sarah Hall’s Helm (2025)”
Abstract: Amongst the catastrophes that are part and characteristic of the climate breakdown in recent British fiction (flood, drought, heat, cold, viruses, plastic pollution, rising sea levels, erosion…), destructive wind is not top of the list. Sarah Hall is an exception. Her 2017 short story “Later, His Ghost” is set in a dystopian world in which feeling human is only a memory because “whatever had been kept in check by the gulfstream was now able to push back and lash around”. Intertextually entangled with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the story employs the motif of the storm to build a bridge between the beginning of the modern dream of human emancipation from the fateful forces of nature, and the catastrophic transformation of this dream into an aggressive, hubristic belief in technological progress and total human mastery of the earth. In her most recent novel, Hall gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name: Helm (2025), title and gravitational centre of the novel, is the only named wind in the UK. The novel tells the story of its eponymous hero from the time before time and names, when all was “serious planetary business”, via a period of mutual fascination between wind and humans, to Anthropocene England where Dr. Selima Sutar researches the wind and the anthropogenic effects on it while Helm must realize that “human time is Helm’s time after all”. In narrative back-and-forth movements between transhistorical human perspectives and Helm’s take on them, between human agency and agency of the more-than-human world, deep history, natural history and human history form a matrix on which Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim that the Anthropocene spells the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between these histories is thrown into sharp relief. While Hall’s short story is set in a dystopian world and fleshes out the struggle for survival in the face of an avenging nature, Helm’s tone is almost elegiac in the end. The romantic relationship between world and “busy, careless humans” has failed. They “probably didn’t mean to hurt”, but they did. Now, divorce is imminent. The two texts thus probe the limits of different genres – short story and novel, dystopian fiction and transhistorical realism – to capture the essence of human-nonhuman relations in the context of climate crisis scenarios.
Bio: Christian Schmitt-Kilb is professor of English literature at the University of Rostock, Germany. In recent years, his research has focused on the field of literature and the environment, including New Nature Writing/Landscape Writing, Ecopoetics and Ecopoetry, ecology and literature of the British left (with a special focus on the work of John Berger), and fiction, environment, and place in the context of Brexit.
Hyang Jo (Seoul National University), “The Revolt of the Four Elements in Faust”
Abstract: Water, fire, earth, air: these four elements each play a significant role in Faust. Moreover, Faust battles the element of water (the sea), particularly in Part Two. He attempts to reclaim tidal flats to create reclaimed land, but Faust’s endeavour to dominate nature fails, and in the final scene of the work, he is lifted up by the element of air. Moreover, the four elements are purified. Might this work be viewed from the perspective of inhuman resistance? The four elements are not dominated by Faust; they transcend him. This presentation attempts to read Faust not by focusing on Faust as an individual and his drama, but by focusing on the four elements. Viewed in this way, existing interpretations of Faust – particularly the debates surrounding Faust’s salvation and the debate over whether this work is a tragedy or not – can be seen in an entirely different light. Illuminating the human-inhuman relationship in Faust allows the paradoxes and contradictions within the work to be reinterpreted. In this drama, the four elements not only resist humanity but are elevated beyond it to a cosmic dimension.
Bio: Hyang Jo is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Literature and Language and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Seoul National University. She is also a member of their Environmental Reading Group. Her research interests include ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, anthropocene discourses, posthumanism, Goethe and Weimar Classicism, Translation Theories, literature and science, intercultural literature, and gender studies.
Marina Messeri (University of Cambridge), “‘Looking forward from the past’: The Lament of the Elements in the 12th-Century Cosmology of Hildegard of Bingen”
Abstract: In her cosmological visions, Hildegard of Bingen – 12th-century benedictine nun and magistra – sees a universe saturated with vitality, or viridity/greenness (viriditas) where the elements are not inert matter but animate, affective forces that express pain, longing, and resistance. This paper presents passages in Hildegard’s texts, such as the Liber Divinorum Operum and the Liber Vitae Meritorum, as early articulations of what might today be framed as a proto-ecological worldview. Central to this reading is the lament of the elements, a striking motif in which earth, air, fire, and water grieve their degradation by human sin. These laments offer a medieval precedent for the narrative of “nature’s revenge” that animates some strands of contemporary discourse on nonhuman resistance and the agency of the other-than-human. Although Hildegard’s cosmology remains fundamentally Christian (a Platonising Catholicism), and retains elements of anthropocentrism, it gestures toward a vision of deep interdependence between human and non/other-than-human. In her framework, both the material and spiritual economies of humanity and the natural world are inextricably entangled.
The paper suggests that alternative futures may be found by listening to voices from the premodern era, as suggested by Rebecca Solnit’s expression “looking forward from the past.” Hildegard’s elemental lament, I argue, is not only a critique of human distorted, immoderate (moderatio being a vital element in Hildegard’s worldview) relation with the environment, but also a call for reparative alliances across species and substances; a medieval mode to foster harmony and balance between humans and other-than-human entities.
Bio: Marina Messeri is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity. She holds a BA and MA in Philosophy (Università Cattolica di Milano), and an MPhil in Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and Religious Studies (University of Cambridge). Her research interests include medieval philosophy and theology, eco-theology and environmental ethics, aesthetics and aesthetic education. At present, she is working on an ecological reading of Hildegard of Bingen’s cosmic anthropology.