Session: 3l
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 2.20
Chair: Reinhard Hennig
Judith Meurer-Bongardt (University of Bonn), “Ambivalent Encounters: Interspecies Storytelling in the Icelandic films Hross í oss (Of Horses and Men, 2013) and Hrútar (Rams, 2015)”
Abstract: In the Icelandic films Hross í oss (2013) and Hrútar (2015), horses and sheep share centre stage with the human protagonists. They occupy a contradictory position as semi-wild, farm and companion animals, a status they have held for over a millennium. There are clear similarities between the two films. Through dry, sometimes macabre humour, they draw attention to the problems that entrenched dualisms can cause. At the same time, the films reveal traces of interspecies coexistence that hark back to a pre-industrial past while also opening up paths to possible futures. The Icelandic landscape, composed of multifaceted relationships between humans, animals, soil, water and rocks, plays an active role in the plot as a shared environment, as do weather phenomena and pathogens. The visual aesthetics and sound design are also similar. Furthermore, the protagonists often communicate non-verbally or through a limited number of sounds, words and short sentences, which blurs the boundaries between human and non-human actors.
However, in terms of their narrative form, the two films differ significantly from one another. The horses in Hross í oss play an active role more frequently than the sheep in Hrútar. Moreover, events are often ocularised by horses, indicating that the film‘s narrative structures are clearly oriented towards them and their mode of communication (Meurer-Bongardt, 2024). This results in a shift in perspective at both the content and structural levels, enabling animals to influence the regimes in which we and they must live (Haraway, 2003).
Both films reflect the ambivalent entanglements of humans and animals, characterised by tenderness, humour and harshness. My analysis of interspecies communication, which takes into account behavioural biology findings and film narratological elements (Kuhn, 2011), reveals that animal-human encounters extend beyond romanticised symbioses and the reproduction of narratives of oppression. The films initiate a polyphonic ethic that is significantly shaped by non-human beings.
Bio: Judith Meurer-Bongardt is a researcher and lecturer at the Unit for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany and an adjunct professor for comparative Nordic literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She received her PhD in 2011 with a dissertation on utopian thinking in Finland-Swedish modernism and has published works on Nordic literature in the Anthropocene with focus on genre, spatiality and temporalities, on plants and animals and on writing and reading as sustainable practices. She is one of the coordinators of the Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN).
Matthias Klestil (University of Innsbruck), “Interspecies Solidarity through Narrative Ambivalence? Versional Storytelling and Nonhuman Animals in Fowler and Martel”
Abstract: While narrative is a fundamentally human activity, the various effects of this activity on (relations to) that and those not considered as residing on this side of the constructed divide between the human and the nonhuman cannot be overestimated. With the premise that revising our narratives thus has the power to contribute significantly to shaping our relations with the more-than-human world, this paper turns to the affordances of a particular type of storytelling. I focus on narratives that create multiple versions of their stories through nonhuman animals, thereby producing a form of ambivalence that has the potential to open new ways of interspecies solidarity.
My paper analyzes two novels as examples of this type of narrative. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) plays with multiple versions and perspectives as it initially hides the fact that the “sister” with whom the protagonist and homodiegetic narrator Rosemary describes growing up is in fact a chimpanzee. This strategy, which has been read for its negotiation of humananimal relationships and its potentials of creating empathy with nonhumans (Calarco; Böhm), I argue, together with Fowler’s achronological technique enables readers to reflect on differences in forms of solidarity among humans and with nonhumans. The second text, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), engages in versional storytelling as its protagonist Piscine ‘Pi’ Patel, after presenting a tale of shipwreck that features nonhuman animals, retrospectively introduces a version of the tale that replaces the nonhuman with human animals. Adding to existing interpretations of the text as rethinking forms of humanism (Ding; Drew 121-167), my focus is on the ambivalence created by this narrative as a strategy for thinking about solidarity in relation to kinship beyond species boundaries. My eco-narratological reading of these texts shows how versional storytelling through nonhumans makes use of the always speculative nature of the human activity of narrative, by mobilizing strategic forms of ambivalence that can help us revise the constructed positions of the human and the nonhuman and afford modes for imagining new forms of interspecies solidarity.
Bio: Matthias Klestil is Postdoc Assistant in American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He received his PhD from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and was Bavarian Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., United States. Klestil’s research interests are in nineteenth-century and contemporary American literature, ecocriticism, narrative theory, and ethnic American literatures. His current research project focuses on “Versional Narration in Contemporary North American Fiction and Film.” Recent publications include Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature (Palgrave 2023), and scholarly articles on Frederick Douglass (The Concord Saunterer 2023), W.E.B. Du Bois (JAAAS 2024), and Jesmyn Ward (Ecozon@ 2025).
Stefan Kjerkegaard (Aarhus University), “Weird Ecologies in Matias Faldbakken: Clay, Care, and the Monstrous”
Abstract: This paper explores how the Norwegian writer Matias Faldbakken’s novels Vi er fem (2020 [We Are Five]) and Stakkel (2022 [Poor Thing]) mobilize the aesthetics of weird fiction to interrogate multispecies relations and more-than-human resistance in the Anthropocene. Both novels center on encounters with strange, unruly beings that destabilize human-centered categories of life, care, and agency, while dramatizing how the ordinary is already haunted by the monstrous.
In Vi er fem, a clay-monster emerges from the combination of grief, technological tinkering, and soil. Initially perceived as a companion and caregiver’s object of affection, the creature increasingly resists domestication, asserting the unruliness of matter itself. The narrative resonates with María Puig de la Bellacasa’s call for cultivating caring, non-linear relations to soil and substance, while also revealing the dangers of trying to master or instrumentalize matter.
Stakkel shifts the focus from soil to flesh: the young Oskar discovers a bandaged, feral girl in the forest, whose grotesque body oscillates between human and nonhuman. Through their relationship, Faldbakken explores how vulnerability, neglect, and dependency bind together human and nonhuman lives. The narrative’s grotesque humor and fairytale-like atmosphere highlight how the monstrous can expose social cruelty while also opening possibilities for unexpected care and kinship.
Read together, these novels develop a Nordic variant of weird fiction that stages encounters with the more-than-human as a mode of resistance. Faldbakken’s clay monster and feral girl both refuse assimilation into extractivist or anthropocentric logics, instead insisting on precarious, uneasy forms of coexistence. By foregrounding the vitality of matter and the instability of species boundaries, Faldbakken’s fiction demonstrates how literature can contribute to reimagining multispecies ecologies and futures beyond human mastery.
Bio: Stefan Kjerkegaard is Associate Professor of Scandinavian Literature at Aarhus University. He specializes in contemporary Nordic fiction, poetry, narratology, autobiography, literary sociology. He leads the Literary Cultures research program and the project Young Literary Practices, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. His current work investigates how literature and writing articulates affective responses to the Anthropocene.
Pavle Luketić (University of Zagreb), “‘Something We Haven’t Ruined Yet’: Nonhuman Life and Ethical Attention in Jens Bjørneboe’s Powderhouse”
Abstract: This paper offers an ecocritical reading of Jens Bjørneboe’s Powderhouse (1969), arguing that the novel anticipates ecological sensibilities through its depiction of nonhuman life and human attentiveness. A brief reference to the “kitchen garden” of the titular Powderhouse, a mental asylum, evokes a utilitarian, instrumental logic in which plants and animals are valued primarily for human use. Similarly, the narrator’s teleological question “What did God intend by the hedgehog?” reduces nonhuman life to human-centered purpose. However, these instrumental perspectives are unsettled by the narrator’s nocturnal garden, also situated on the asylum grounds, where fruit trees, snails, bats, and the hedgehog persist outside human control, forming a feral ecology.
The narrator’s sustained attentiveness to the sensory richness of the garden, culminating in him offering a saucer of milk to the hedgehog, models a proto-ecological ethic in which perception and engagement form a responsive relationship with the living world. Read through the lens of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic (1949), the night garden illustrates a shift from use-oriented thinking toward recognition of membership in a biotic community: nonhuman persistence and human provision together create a dynamic in which awareness of vulnerability generates responsibility.
In this sense, Powderhouse arguably contains the early germs of environmental thinking without retroactively imposing contemporary debates on the novel. The hedgehog, whose quiet presence also bookends the narrative, exemplifies the ethical potential embedded in attentive human–nonhuman relations. Bjørneboe’s asylum garden thus stages an intersection of perception, material presence, and ethical response, highlighting how literary representation can prefigure ecological consciousness and practices of small-scale, more-than-human solidarity.
Bio: Pavle Luketić is a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Scandinavian Section of the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He is a PhD candidate in Literature at the same institution, working on an ecocritical reading of Jens Bjørneboe’s so-called History of Bestiality trilogy.