Session: 5f
Day: Thursday 15 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet
Anna Potoczny (University of Warsaw), “A “Squirrel Cage Mind”: Virginia Woolf, Animal Entrapment, and Creaturely Poiesis”
Abstract: Analysing Virginia Woolf’s fiction as well as her sizeable body of literary criticism and life-writing, one cannot fail to observe the modernist author’s tendency to employ animal metaphor for her staging and scrutiny of the writing process. Employing the biosemiotic understanding of metaphor as a “pattern that connects” (Gregory Bateson) the mind and the environment, or nature and culture, I explore Woolf’s figurations of writing or failure to write as animal labor as well as violence done to an animal through entrapment, loss of habitat, or otherwise. First, I aim to demonstrate that her relentless employment of such metaphors works to emphasise the ‘creaturely’ (Anat Pick) vulnerability of body and mind alike, and hence the animal nature of poiesis as that which pertains both to an organism and a work of literature. Second, if human cultures and other-than-human Umwelten are structured by essentially similar semiotic processes, then their unfolding depends on the existence of ‘affordances’—elements of the environment that can “act as objects of signs,” according to Timo Maran’s definition. Consequently, not only survival of the species but also the survival of a semiotic system proves to be dependent on the material environment and, just like species, semiotic systems, too, can go extinct (an occurrence for which Ivan Puura coined the term ‘semiocide’). Similarly, creaturely semiotic freedom, just like creaturely bodily freedom, can be limited by oppressive societies and systems.
Animal insights and instances from Woolf’s rich oeuvre can help illustrate how the detachment from the essentially creaturely nature of meaning-making can lead not only to biosystemic but equally to cultural impoverishment. Conversely, understanding language and culture as organic can serve as an antidote to a productionist imperative of a culture increasingly hinging on the ceaseless repetition of the same.
Bio: Anna Potoczny is a 4th-year PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where she works on a PhD dissertation titled Virginia Woolf’s Literary Compost: Literature as a More-than-Human Entanglement. Her research areas include 20th-century Anglophone literature, ecocriticism, Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and biosemiotics. Additionally, she’s a part of a research team working on the project Animal Adaptations: Film Adaptations of Literary Animal Characters, from the Silent Screen to Hollywood’s Golden Age (PI: Justyna Włodarczyk).
Sara Familiar Rodriguez (University of Léon), “Stings and Silences: Ecoanxiety and Ecofeminism Sylvia Plath’s ‘Bee Sequence’”
Abstract: Sylvia Plath’s “Bee Sequence” (1962), one of her most symbolically productive pieces of poetry offers a complex meditation on power, identity, and survival through the figure of the bee. Long read primarily in biographical or psychological terms, these poems demand reconsideration as an ecological and ecofeminist text, where the feminine and the natural are inextricably linked. In the “Bee Sequence”, her poetic personae assumes multiple roles within the hive: the beekeeper who exerts control, the queen whose authority is precarious, and the worker or sacrifice subjected to violence. This shifting identification produces a poetics of the feminine that is communal, embodied, and vulnerable, yet also threatening and transgressive. The bees emerge not only as symbols of female creativity and fertility, but also as figures of exploitation and silencing within patriarchal systems. Published in the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the latter provides a critical ecological framework for understanding the pertinence of bees in Plath’s work, particularly when combined with ecofeminist and even ecogothic theoretical concepts. Carson’s warnings about the chemical assault on pollinators resonate with the sinister undertones of Plath’s hive imagery. Through this lens, the “Bee Sequence” anticipates contemporary concerns about ecological collapse, climate change, and the gendered dynamics of environmental discourse. This proposal explores Plath’s feminine ecology: one that refuses the binaries of victim and master, human and nonhuman, and instead reveals the interdependence of bodies, labor, and survival. By situating Plath within an ecofeminist tradition informed by Carson, the analysis underscores the urgent relevance of the “Bee Sequence” not only as a personal testament, but as a poetic intervention into ongoing debates about nature, power, and the feminine.
Bio: BA in English Philology, MA in Teacher Training, and in European Culture. PhD candidate in ‘Contrastive and Comparative Studies: English/French/Spanish’ on the topic of ecocritical/ecofeminist studies of North American poetry, supervised by Dr. Imelda Martín Junquera. Predoctoral researcher at the Modern Languages Dept (ULE). Author of chapters on Ecofeminism, Posthumanism and Sustainable Education. Visiting researcher at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of US Studies. Member of the research group GEHUMECO (Gender, Humanities, Ecocriticism) and assistant editor of Ecozon@.
Ene-Reet Soovik (University of Tartu), “Resilience and Resistance: Urban Plants in Contemporary Estonian Poetry”
Abstract: The editors of the recent multiauthor volume Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience and Resistance: Cities Under Stress (Prieto, Lanigan, Lappela 2025) emphasise the crucial importance of studying urban environments – the habitat of a rapidly growing number of humans across the globe – in the face of the current climate crisis and related environmental threats. Cities emerging as sites of multispecies co-existence are also related to concepts such as Timothy Bealey’s ‘biophilic cities’ rich in elements of wildness that, amongst other benefits, can also inspire human fascination and wonder, Jennifer Wolch’s ‘zoöpolis’ that aims to reintegrate people with animal dwellers of the city space, eventually bringing about trans-species urban practices, and Jamie Lorimer’s ‘cosmopolitics for wildlife’ that sees location-specific issues participating in species mobility forging cosmopolitan connections.
Using these notions as a framework, the presentation will observe the interweaving of the natural dimension and urban environment in contemporary Estonian poetry. A special focus will be on poems connected with the city of Tartu whose status as a UNESCO City of Literature seems to be accompanied by a heightened artistic awareness of the mutual impact of urban space and the literature stemming from it. Also, the city’s participation in the European Capital of Culture initiative in 2024 with a programme entitled ‘Arts of Survival’ involved enhancing curated biodiversity in the city centre. While earlier literary scholarship in Estonia has paid more attention to representations of vertebrate urban wildlife, particularly birds, in literature, this contribution will focus on the role of plants in poetic urban environments. It attempts to chart both cultivated green spaces as well as chaotic edgelands in the urban fringes and independently emerging ruderal species, tracing the plants’ poetic function as well as the agency attributed to them in the texts considered.
Bio: Ene-Reet Soovik is an editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies published at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and member of the Estonian Research Council’s research project ‛Meaning of endangered species in culture: ecology, semiotic modelling and reception’. Her scholarly interests include literary urban studies, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and contemporary poetry; she has published in all of these fields both in Estonia and internationally. She is currently guest editing a blue humanities special issue of the journal Methis. Studia humaniora estonica.