Ecological Imaginaries

Some thoughts on Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment and the pastoral genre Once more, I have Twitter to thank for the recommendation to read Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) (@wolfseule this time)! I devoured it last summer and it hasn’t left my mind since. I...

This is a paper I gave in summer 2020. I haven't gotten to turning it into a 'proper' article, yet, but I don't believe in things rotting in my cloud, so here it is and I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts on my thinking together deep time and literary history (with US-American literary history as...

(To read part one, go to: Sitting like/on a Tree (Part I)) The Baron in the Trees Rory is in good company, many fictional and non-fictional humans seek refuge on and under trees. It is a special kind of refuge, though. Tree-sitters not necessarily seek shelter from rain and cold, persecution or outs...

I cannot believe it took me three months to even begin writing this post. I’ve been on an activity, alternating with phases of exhaustion, bringing the project along, writing new proposals (this is academia for you, while I’m happily announcing that I can finally write, all I do is plot new funding...

Part II: Wellerman: Singing of Whales and Hope? When the Wellerman-craze started in January 2021, it reminded me of the backend of a party. That point at which you have exchanged all pleasantries, news and gossip and silly things can happen. Silly things such as breaking out into song. To my mind th...

Part I: Happy Fish Bear with me, as you will have to wait for the happy fish for a bit. Fish brought me back from a lockdown-induced writer’s block. Fish reminded me that the ways in which the pandemic changes our environments in very immediate ways need to be understood not only in terms of the gre...

Guest Post by Christina Becher When I was invited to contribute to the blog Ecological Imaginaries, I was pretty excited: Suddenly there was a chance to write about something I came cross during my time as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona in Tucson (USA). One of my favorite things the...

This is the first of a series of readings in which I explore texts that propose the possibility of encountering trees or encountering the world through trees. Like small reviews these readings are supposed to give hints to how human-tree-relationships form the core of what I call 'the cultural poeti...

In the very first session of the introduction to Comparative Literature at Ruhr-Uni Bochum, we were taught how to justify picking this subject to our parents. While I have told this anecdote a number of times as a funny twist on how my mother might have been the only person in the entire world who w...

Ecological relationships are a product of human imagination. Trees do not need humans for the exchange of nutrients with fungi or the provision of shelter for birds, but it takes human imagination to narrate these exchanges as meaningful relationships. Words and matter are intricately intertwined an...