%0 Journal Article 
%A Oscarson, Christopher
%T Where the Ground Answers the Foot: Kerstin Ekman, Ecology, and the Sense of Place in a Globalized World
%D 2010
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/21190
%X Kerstin Ekman has emerged as one of the important literary voices in 
Northern Europe challenging facile definitions of nature and inviting readers to 
reconsider conceptions of the local. She accomplishes this by using ecological 
models in her fiction that explore how human subjects exist in interdependent 
relationships with their environments intertwining space with experience and 
memory to produce constellations of significance and meaning. The materiality of 
the space combines with human discourse to create a sense of place situated 
between immediate and the distant and between the constructed and the found.
In particular, her 1993 work, Händelser vid vatten [Blackwater] explores an 
ecological model of ontology in which all elements are intricately interconnected in 
myriad ways that question, among other things, the construction of place and the 
role of both materiality and place in an increasingly mobile, technologically 
mediated, and globalized world. My purpose is to consider Ekman's model(s) of 
ecological interdependence in dialogue with the theoretical discussions of space 
and place that have emerged in recent decades, particularly within the field of 
ecocriticism. In Ekman's work, the decidedly human propensities for naming, 
narrating, manipulating, and constructing space are counterbalanced by an 
experience of materiality and the natural environment's ultimate ambivalence to 
anthropocentrism. The novel's network of competing narratives, memories, 
definitions, and confrontation with materiality tend to frustrate the classical 
modernist epistemological project by lacking clear linearity, diverging, converging, 
and doubling back on themselves. The effect is to focus readers' attention on how 
space is produced as a means of understanding the diffuse subject's being in the 
world as part of complex material and discursive networks as well as between the 
constructed and the found, the subjective and the objective, the embodied and the 
abstract, and the local and the global.
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala