Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
Nature And The "Dark Pastoral" In Goethe's Werther, Heather I. Sullivan
Nature And The "Dark Pastoral" In Goethe's Werther, Heather I. Sullivan
Heather I Sullivan
Celebrating the natural harmony of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe’s eponymous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with “simple” peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life—at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from—or, more precisely, abstracted from—the urban sites where …
Dirty Traffic And The Dark Pastoral In The Anthropocene: Narrating Refugees, Deforestation, Radiation, And Melting Ice, Heather I. Sullivan
Dirty Traffic And The Dark Pastoral In The Anthropocene: Narrating Refugees, Deforestation, Radiation, And Melting Ice, Heather I. Sullivan
Heather I Sullivan
“Dirt is essentially disorder [....] Dirt offends against order,” asserts Mary Douglas in her 1966 anthropological text on “purity and pollution.” Dirt disturbs order; hence dirt is that which is disorderly and “out of place.” Similarly, according to Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (2012) the term pollution describes a cultural norm denoting something out of place: pollution, he writes, “does not name a substance or class of substances, but rather represents an implicit normative claim that too much of something is present in the environment, usually in the wrong place.” This definition of pollution and dirt as “something out of place,” however, …
Agency In The Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, And The New Materialisms, Heather I. Sullivan
Agency In The Anthropocene: Goethe, Radical Reality, And The New Materialisms, Heather I. Sullivan
Heather I Sullivan
Our current era has been termed the Age of the “Anthropocene,” or the human- inflected geological era. This essay addresses the implications of human impact on the Earth as a form of “radical reality” by addressing the broad spectrum of human and non-human agency. The analysis follows a three-step process: it begins with an introduction to the new materialisms and distributed agency in contrast to Howard Tuttle’s notion of “radical reality” based on human consciousness. It then explores the agency of nature’s “vibrancy” in the debate occurring early in the Anthropocene (during Goethe’s lifetime) between “vitalism” and “mechanism.” Finally, I …
The Dark Pastoral: Goethe And Atwood, Heather I. Sullivan
The Dark Pastoral: Goethe And Atwood, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to find means of representing and analysing our fossil-fueled practices that have spread industrial particulates over the entire globe, changed the climate, and reshaped landscapes into a “new nature.” In this essay, I propose the “dark pastoral” as an analytical trope, examining two framing texts from the Anthropocene: Goethe’s landmark 1797 pastoral German epic, Hermann and Dorothea, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the first installment of her MaddAddam trilogy which ends with a surprisingly pastoral flourish. At the early phases of the Anthropocene (as it is defined by Paul …