%0 Journal Article 
%A Marland, Pippa J.
%T “Heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery”: assemblages, ethics and affect in W. G. Sebald’s Orford Ness
%D 2014
%@ 2171-9594
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20868
%X At the beginning of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the narrator sets off to walk the county of 
Suffolk to try and shake off the sense of emptiness he experiences whenever he finishes a long piece of 
work. However, far from effecting the kind of reconnection associated with the Thoreauvian saunterer or 
the walkers of narrative scholarship, this journey leaves him prey to a “paralysing horror” which assails 
him “when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident 
even in that remote place”. Nowhere are these ‘traces of destruction’ more apparent than on the almost-island of Orford Ness, where the post-apocalyptic landscape and the contraptions of the abandoned 
military base induce in him the fantasy that he is present long after the extinction of our civilization. 
This essay explores the dissonant affective implications of these all-too-human traces of 
destruction, drawing on concepts such as ‘thing-power’ (Bennett), ‘assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari), 
and the generative interplay of ‘actants’ (Latour), suggesting that while the material turn in ecocriticism 
has contributed valuable theoretical tools to the posthumanist project of decentring the human, its 
emphasis on our material imbrication in the life of the planet, with its myriad agencies and forms of 
signification, has at times deflected attention too far from the specificity of the human and the ongoing 
impact of our unique forms of ‘technicity,’ both on the landscape and on our own consciousness. It 
suggests the need for a tentative ongoing humanism within the posthumanist project, albeit from a 
decentred and position of reduced authority, that focuses on the unrelenting interrogation of the 
specificities of the human animal.

%K literary criticism
%K English literature
%K European literature
%K Cultural studies
%K Crítica literaria
%K Literatura inglesa
%K Literatura europea
%K Estudios culturales
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala