Where the Ground Answers the Foot: Kerstin Ekman, Ecology, and the Sense of Place in a Globalized World
Autores
Oscarson, ChristopherEditor
Universidad de Alcalá
Fecha de publicación
2010-10Cita bibliográfica
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 1, n. 2 (2010), pp. 8-21
Tipo de documento
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Versión del editor
http://ecozona.eu/index.php/journal/article/view/66/391Derechos de acceso
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Resumen
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.
Ficheros en el ítem
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where_Oscarson_ecozona_2010_N2.pdf | 441.9Kb |
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