Session: 4e
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Matthias Klestil
Sylvia Mayer (University of Bayreuth), “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Poetics of Resilience: Nonhuman Resistance and Multispecies Coexistence”
Abstract: This paper investigates how Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays and fiction contribute to the theorization of resilience, nonhuman resistance, and multispecies coexistence within the environmental humanities. While the neoliberal concept and practice of resilience building have been criticized for privatizing adaptability and obscuring structural causes of crisis, literary studies has begun to draw attention to the variety of concepts and practices of resilience that are communicated in fictional texts. Depending on, for instance, geographical, socioeconomic, and cultural perspective, they present different temporalities and spatialities through which practices of adaptation and survival become thinkable. Le Guin’s theoretical and fictional work – in this paper most notably “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” and her ethnographical novel Always Coming Home – develops a concept of resilience that displaces neoliberal notions and narratives, proposing instead distributed agency, reciprocity, and care. Crucially, such a reconfiguration also involves reconceiving resistance as the cultivation of practices that sustain ecologically and culturally rewarding multispecies coexistence.
Building on insights from ecocriticism, posthumanist theory, and resilience studies, the paper argues that Le Guin’s work offers a distinct poetics of resilience that, not only with respect to nonhuman resistance, challenges and transcends both anthropocentric revenge imaginaries and neoliberal instrumentalizing discourses of adaptability. Her speculative narration shows that literature can function as a site of “more-than-human” world-building, where resistance is not a spectacle of “nature’s revenge,” but the expression of a rebellious practice of living differently. In this sense, Le Guin’s poetics reconceptualizes resistance based on principles of sympoetic meaning-making and redefines practices of resistance as relying on multispecies solidarities.
Bio: Sylvia Mayer is Professor of American Studies and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bayreuth. Over the last years, her ecocritical work has focused on the literary and cultural imagination of (planetary) environmental risk, most importantly, on the study of climate change fiction as environmental risk narratives. More recently, this focus has been complemented by an additional focus on issues of (environmental) resilience building. Her publications include monographs on Toni Morrison’s early novels and on the environmental ethical dimension of New England Regionalist Writing, 1865 –1918. She has edited and co-edited several volumes, among them Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination (2003) and The Anticipation of Catastrophe. Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (2014, with Alexa Weik von Mossner). Her most recent essay publications discuss climate fiction by Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jenny Offill as environmental resilience narratives. A coedited special issue on “Environmental Citizenship” is forthcoming with Amerikastudien/American Studies.
Esther-Marie Schilling (University of Rostock), “In Forests & Along the Shores: Non-Human Spaces as Gendered Contact Zones in Speculative Fiction”
Abstract: This paper examines forests and shorelines in contemporary speculative fiction as gendered spaces of non-human resistance. In the Western imagination, these spaces are traditionally conceived as borders between “Wilderness” and “Civilisation”. However, novels like Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel, 2014) and Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018) portray them as metaphorical and material contact zones between different temporalities and modes of existence. As such, they evade human domination and conceptualisation on a variety of levels and invite a reconsideration of agency not as a human-centred force, but as a diffuse mode of resistance. Station Eleven anchors its story in the multi-level rupture of a pandemic and survivors of the pandemic now have to live in and with “Wilderness”. And, while characters operate within a stereotypical nature-culture binary, the novel’s framework itself highlights the artificiality of this dichotomy. Thus, the forest functions as site of temporal and spatial defiance:
While it is variously imbued with different metaphorical connotations, it transcends temporal and cultural contexts and remains an independent entity beyond human control. It is simultaneously fixed and fluid in meaning and materiality, it is an active agent, and physically expands into the former realm of “Civilisation”. This outward movement of the forest contrasts with the ocean’s inwardly-directed erosion of shorelines, which continuously reshapes the shore in its physicality. This dynamic tension is especially notable in Red Clocks. Here, the forest functions as a safe haven for female characters while beaches – with dead whales washed ashore – serve as an all-encompassing confrontation with decay and the dissolution of land. Although an ecofeminist lens reveals these forests and shores as possible gendered zones, I argue that a close reading of their ecological modes of resistance complicates such assumptions and instead imagines them as transcending binary understandings.
Bio: Esther-Marie Schilling is lecturer and 2nd year PhD candidate at the Institute for British and American Studies at University of Rostock. She teaches literary and (some) cultural studies and is coordinator of the newly established M.A. programme “Culture, Ecology, Change”. Her academic interests include literary representations of contemporary anxieties, as well as narratives of social and political unrest. Her dissertation project examines the intersection and narratives of women’s roles, climate change, and eroding democracy in contemporary speculative fiction.
Manuela Crivelli (University of Oxford), “Dengue Boy: Imagining Hybridity as Resistance on a Damaged Earth”
Abstract: Published in 2023, La infancia del mundo is a work of speculative fiction that imagines a catastrophic future in which the anthropogenic shaping of the planet has radically altered its physical and political geography. In this novel, Argentine author Michel Nieva offers a blunt critique of capitalist modes of exploitation and harm through the figure of the dengue boy, a human-mosquito hybrid who seeks revenge against those responsible for his mother’s suffering. This presentation responds to the call for papers’ invitation to envision forms of nonhuman resistance beyond entrenched dualisms and human exceptionalism. Particularly, I examine how the novel pursues this project both thematically and formally, focusing on how hybridity and excess function as devices for imagining multispecies alliances on a damaged Earth.
I read the abject morphology of the dengue boy as a transgressive body that unsettles the boundary between human and animal while undermining broader categories structuring Western epistemologies and traditional depictions of the relationship with the nonhuman. By tracing the subjectivity of a creature situated at the margins of both the human and the animal, the novel resists definitive categorisation and instead proposes hybridity as a model on which to articulate more-than-human agency and resistance.
This negotiation also unfolds on a narrative level: constant shifts in perspective, temporality, and scale generate a delirious textuality that resists stable representation, turning excess into a mode of attunement to the nonhuman. By destabilising narrative conventions and linguistic codes, the novel refuses a unified account of reality and instead performs a continuous labour of dismemberment and reconstruction of the story. Ultimately, I argue that the text itself emerges as a monstrous, shifting narrative, whose elusive shape signals both the impossibility of fully capturing the nonhuman and the fascinating prospect of becoming-with it.
Bio: Manuela Crivelli is a DPhil candidate in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the representation of catastrophic futures in works of contemporary Southern Cone fiction, with a particular interest in the ways in which these novels explore new strategies for narrating the experience of vulnerability and uncertainty that characterises a time of environmental disruption. Her research interests include memory studies, new materialisms, the Anthropocene, and environmental humanities.
Yu-Ching Wang (National Chi Nan University), “Re-Worlding: Multispecies Intimacy and (in)Justice in Becky Chambers’s Monk and Robot Series”
Abstract: This paper examines the affective, ethical, and material-semiotic dimensions of multispecies intimacy and (in)justice in Becky Chambers’ science fiction series Monk and Robot, demonstrating how human-nonhuman relations are mediated culturally. Set on the fictional moon Panga, the novels imagine a world in which robots have voluntarily renounced servitude, peacefully retreated into the wilderness, and idly dedicated their time to observing and comprehending the world. Different world views unfold and contest each other through the encounter and shared journey of a non-binary monk, Dex, and a sentient robot, Mosscap. Dex’s yearning for the sounds of endangered crickets in the wilderness motivates them to leave behind their urban gardening vocation and become a traveling tea monk, providing tea and comfort to the people of Panga. Dex meets Mosscap in the wilderness when Mosscap is undertaking a quasi-ethnographic expedition to explore what human needs in a world no longer governed by labor obligations. While Dex’s longing for the sounds of crickets conveys a sense of ecological nostalgia and multispecies intimacy, their fear and discomfort with the wild and their casual invocation of leeches and parasites as metaphors for human unproductivity lead us to question how their differential affective responses are produced. Although fragments of human knowledge remain embedded in Mosscap’s robotic memory, the robot demonstrates the capacity to be affected and become-with the world. By recognizing the intrinsic and ontological value of the unloved species within the ecological system, Mosscap challenges Dex’s anthropocentric hierarchy and neoliberal trope. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s posthuman care, this paper demonstrates how affects circulate, through bodies, discourses, and environments, and argues that destigmatizing metaphors of abject or unloved species can cultivate more capacious ways of knowing and caring, opening space for a demoralized and relational vision of multispecies justice.
Bio: Yu-ching Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chi Nan University (NCNU), Taiwan. She also serves as secretariat-general for the Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China. Her research interests include contemporary English and American literature, affect theories, medical humanities, animal ethics, and environmental humanities. She teaches “AI in Literature and Film”, “Emotion, Affect, and AI”, and “Technology, Life, and Ethics of Caring” at NCNU.