RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article T1 “Heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery”: assemblages, ethics and affect in W. G. Sebald’s Orford Ness A1 Marland, Pippa J. K1 literary criticism K1 English literature K1 European literature K1 Cultural studies K1 Crítica literaria K1 Literatura inglesa K1 Literatura europea K1 Estudios culturales K1 Literatura K1 Literature K1 Medio ambiente K1 Environmental science AB 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. PB Universidad de Alcalá SN 2171-9594 YR 2014 FD 2014-10 LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20868 UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20868 LA eng DS MINDS@UW RD 28-mar-2024