Session: 1l
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.20
Chair:
Reinhard Hennig (University of Hagder), “The Last Troll: Fantastic Species as Threatened and Threatening Nature in Contemporary Norwegian Literature and Film”
Abstract: In Old Norse literature as well as in Norwegian folk tales, trolls figure as creatures living outside humanly populated areas and threatening humans whenever encounters between the two species take place. These trolls, despite their anthropomorphic appearance, function as combined representations of various dangers emanating from nonhuman nature. However, in recent Norwegian literature, such as Tor Åge Bringsværd’s children’s book series about the young troll Tambar (2010-2019), relations are reversed: trolls are here likeable creatures, standing for an originally harmonic, friendly nature that is constantly reduced and threatened by humans. Recent debates about biodiversity loss and human pressure on Norway’s natural areas also form the background to director Roar Uthaug’s immensely successful Netflix movie Troll (2022). Here, tunnel construction in the Dovrefjell area awakens an enormous troll that eventually threatens the Norwegian capital with destruction. This troll can be understood as a synecdochic representation of nonhuman nature, reacting against its increasing anthropogenic degradation, and conveying implicit views and norms on area transformation and its socioecological consequences also for Norwegian national identity. However, while the film plays on widespread narratives of species extinction, including elegiac representation of the troll as “the last of its kind”, the troll, despite the compassion felt for it by the human main characters, is in the end eliminated by these same characters to protect human civilization – which arguably portrays further anthropogenic degradation of natural areas as inevitable. In this talk, I will critically discuss how such popular representations of the fantastic species of the troll as both nature under threat and threatening nature in contemporary literature and film can be understood in a wider context of disagreements within Norwegian society about environmental risks and exploitation of natural resources.
Bio: Reinhard Hennig is professor of Nordic literature at the University of Agder, Norway. He is former president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) and co-founder and coordinator of the Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN). He is currently involved in the multidisciplinary research project Translatability of Oil (TOIL; funded by the Research Council of Norway, 2023–27).
Guðrun í Jákupsstovu (University of the Faroe Islands), “Materiality and Mythology as Nonhuman Resistance in Contemporary Nordic Literature”
Abstract: This contribution centres its inquiry around three works of Nordic literature: Siri Ranva Jacobsen’s The Sea Letters (2018), Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water (2019) and Morten Strøksnes’ Shark Drunk (2015). These works have in common that they all draw on various forms of mythological and epic narratives to convey and problematise themes of ecological decline and human exceptionalism. This paper considers the use of mythological stories to contextualise Anthropocene scales as well as to articulate ecological decline as a form of moral retribution and judgment. Furthermore, it asks how a focus on materiality can productively raise the stakes for an engagement with the usefulness of myths in environmental narratives.
In The Sea Letters, the Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans are anthropomorphised as letter-writing sisters, who conspire in a plan to flood the world as retribution for humanity’s destructive impact on the planet. The text thus draws on the well-known flood myth to thematise the very material threat of rising sea levels. Similarly, Shark Drunk follows two men’s pursuit to catch the elusive Greenland shark, cast as an ultimate “monster of the deep”, whose species’ age allows it to be read as an embodiment of deep, Anthropocene time, and the men’s pursuit of catching it as an enactment of geological agency. Considering these two texts together with Magnason’s claim that climate change is happening at “mythological speed”, this paper asks how the material agencies of animals and natural environments contribute to the potency of mythological narratives, and how these raise the stakes for our understanding of nonhuman resistance in the Anthropocene.
Bio: Guðrun í Jákupsstovu is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of the Faroe Islands. Her research explores literary representations of islands, coastlines and oceans and focuses particularly on how these settings produce experiences of time in relation to climate change and the Anthropocene. She has published on Anthropocene temporalities in the journal Nordeuropaforum and is currently working on the manuscript for her first monograph. In the coming time, she will be turning her attention towards Faroese oceanic literature and how these can be read together with contemporary geopolitical tensions in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Hanna Hoorenman (Utrecht University), “Animal Attraction: The Sticky Temptation of Omegaverse Romance”
Abstract: Shapeshifters have been enjoying massive popularity in the field of paranormal popular romance in the past twenty years. Shifter romance is a relatively recent subgenre, coming to prominence after 2001, but stories of humans mating with animals and shifting into animals are indeed as old, perhaps not as time itself, then certainly as old as humans are. As a mixed-genre phenomenon, shifter romance combines the world-building strategies of fantasy fiction with the promise of emotional justice and fantasy-fulfilment of the romance genre. Taking a literary deep-time approach to the longue durée of shapeshifting narratives, this paper follows two central lines of inquiry: how do these stories mean, and what sort of cultural work within our specific historical situation.
Drawing on Dominic Pettman’s Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human and Boria Sax’ The Serpent and the Swan: Animal Brides in Literature and Folklore, my paper explores the question of animality in shapeshifting romance novels in which either the FMC or both FMC and MMC are (part) were-animals, with particular attention to Nalini Singh’s long-running cult-favourite Psy/Changeling series. Since heterosexual shape-shifter romance typically situates the male hero as the shifter, and the female as the human, I discuss the gendered implications of shifting, the species-considerations of transformation and the dynamics of predation and physiological difference in inter-species were-relationships. Primarily, I ask what form of animality is explored in these paranormal romance novels, in which ways these fantasies of ‘becoming-animal’ speak to the humanimal that we are, and what fantasies of more-than-human communities they imagine.
Bio: Hanna Hoorenman is Assistant Professor in American literature at Utrecht University. She has published on the role of animals in American poetry as well as on historical romance fiction and cultural memory. She is currently guest editing the special issue “Romancing the Posthuman” for the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Her work on posthumanism in Anglophone fiction interrogates the way in which humans investigate or imaginatively transcend the boundaries of their humanity through stories of love with non-human others.
Shibaji Mridha (American International University-Bangladesh), “From Revenge to Romance: Re-visiting Ponyo and The Shape of Water in the Age of Orca Uprising”
Abstract: The recent “Orca Uprising” has prompted environmental thinkers and enthusiasts worldwide to re-evaluate humanity’s attitude towards non-human multispecies. One challenge in developing multispecies care and recognition in a human-dominated world lies in the lack of visibility of the non-humans in the mainstream cultural imaginaries. Ecocinema’s powerful visual narratives can make humans more sensitive to reciprocal, non-hierarchical human/non-human relationships, initiating a contact zone between species. This paper examines two films, Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki and The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, which foreground both multispecies injustice and care. Challenging species hierarchy, Ponyo explores an intra-species friendship between a human boy Sosuke and a goldfish Ponyo, and The Shape of Water showcases an intra-species affair between a mute woman Elisa and an anonymous amphibian creature. Drawing on animal studies, post-humanist discourse, and recent developments in environmental ethics, this study highlights how these visual stories subvert the idea of human subjectivity, allowing non-human species to take over the traditional role of human protagonists. Instead of creating an entrenched dualism pitting one against the other, both the films find alternative spaces for reconciliation and commonality amid initial resistance and chaos. Undermining our taken-for-granted human experience, the narratives allow us to witness new dimensions of ethical entanglements in more-than-human ways. The films’ odyssey from reluctance to acceptance and indifference to care frames these films as tales of revenge and romance, advancing the idea of interspecies recognition, reciprocity, and responsibility.
Bio: Shibaji Mridha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at American International University-Bangladesh. He obtained his second MA in literature and writing at Kent State University, Ohio, USA. His thesis is titled “Ecocinema, Slow Violence, and Environmental Ethics: Tales of Water.” He completed an MA in English Literature and a BA in English from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. His areas of interest are environmental humanities, material ecocriticism, water studies, and postcolonialism. Currently, he is a member of ASLE and ASLE-ASEAN.