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- Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
English Text Construction - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 15, Issue 2, 2022
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Animals squawking their mysteries
Author(s): Marco Caracciolopp.: 118–137 (20)More LessAbstractScholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) as a powerful example of how the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”
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“Shadowtime”
Author(s): Shannon Lambertpp.: 138–155 (18)More LessAbstractThis paper explores “shadowtime”, or the co-existence of multiple temporalities, in Michelle Paver’s novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story (2010). Dark Matter is filled with temporally strange figures that evade human vision and understanding. Central among these is the spectral presence of a gengånger, or ghost, which haunts the Arctic research station where the novel is largely set. After tracking some of the metaphorical and material dimensions of the spectral, this essay investigates “shadowtime” in the context of the novel’s various ‘archives’. It then looks at how the incorporeal or immaterial concepts of value and choice frame the novel’s ‘dark matters’. ‘Possibility’, or the question of ‘what if?’ pervades the novel’s pages, encouraging readers to imagine multiple realities simultaneously. This essay argues that, although set in a period predating wide awareness of climate change, Dark Matter’s “shadowtimes” create forms of temporal and ontological instability that resonate with the existential uncertainties of the Anthropocene.
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A more perfect dissolution
Author(s): Laura Michielspp.: 156–174 (19)More LessAbstractSamuel D. Hunter’s 2019 play Greater Clements is named after a fictional former mining town in Northern Idaho, which straddles the space between presence and absence. The locals have decided to put an end to a dispute with the Californian second-homers that have flocked to town in recent years, by voting to unincorporate. Hunter has indicated that the play relies heavily on the “toxicity of nostalgia”, on which the present essay concentrates. This article explores nostalgia as connected to two marginalised communities in Greater Clements: the miners, now out of work due to the effects of deindustrialisation, and the town’s Japanese American residents, who are still reeling from the trauma of wartime internment.
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Teaching eco-translation
Author(s): Angela Kölling and Melina Liebpp.: 175–195 (21)More LessAbstractThe coronavirus pandemic has kept us individually as well as publicly in a state of preoccupation that prohibited us from staying with the trouble of an ecologically damaged planet. The authors of this contribution are sharing their experience and reflections upon teaching, as an active intervention to this absent presence in everyday Covid-19 lives, an eco-translation course. For this we will first offer a short discussion of our scholarly backgrounds and biases. Second, we will describe our efforts in translating these biases into concrete teaching. The course that serves here as a case study was taught in a project format in the 2021 winter term 2 at the Faculty for Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Mainz University. It was a five-day course which blended localisation and nature writing framed by a holistic approach to scholarship and teaching. Third, we will discuss the teaching experience in terms of the presences and absences it made apparent.
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