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Articles 1 - 30 of 129
Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
Bad Plants, Heather I. Sullivan
Bad Plants, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
“Bad plants” represent the seemingly unexpected and startling forms of plant power overlooked by many modern, industrialized societies that treat vegetal beings as mere resources instead of animate, world-shaping forces. Since science fiction and fairy tales often explore more openly animistic visions of non-human life, such texts provide ample possibilities for reconsideration by critical plant studies of our human-plant relations both cultural and ecological. For example, both Jack McDevitt’s 2001 science fiction novel, Deepsix, and Ludwig Tieck’s 1799 fairy tale, “Faithful Eckart and Tannhäuser”, feature “bad plants” that bring human beings violently back into the plant cycles they assume they …
Kafka And The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
Kafka And The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
Plant Worlds, Heather I. Sullivan
Plant Worlds, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Plant communities create and enable most of Earth’s living worlds by shaping ecological water and airflows, producing energy and matter through photosynthesis, and linking into vast, interconnected mycorrhizal fungal networks of communication to form interactive, multispecies, and distributive intelligences. We all live in various plant-formed worlds, an under-acknowledged fact in many extractivist cultures today. This essay briefly compares three works of science fiction featuring alien forest worlds that focus specifically on world-shaping vegetal power in which human or humanoid beings exist: Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 The Word for World is Forest, Alan Dean Foster’s 1975 Midworld and Marcus Hammerschitt’s …
Goethe And Our Endangered Natural World, Heather I. Sullivan
Goethe And Our Endangered Natural World, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
Unexpected Plant Bodies, Heather I. Sullivan
Unexpected Plant Bodies, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
Cross-Infections Of Vegetal-Human Bodies In Science Fiction, Heather I. Sullivan
Cross-Infections Of Vegetal-Human Bodies In Science Fiction, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
It is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg's German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor's graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species …
"Mi Estilo Lo Confirma Letra Por Letra": La Literatura Criminal En "El Niño Proletario" De Osvaldo Lamborghini, Ana María Mutis
"Mi Estilo Lo Confirma Letra Por Letra": La Literatura Criminal En "El Niño Proletario" De Osvaldo Lamborghini, Ana María Mutis
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
El presente ensayo examina el discurso del narrador en el cuento “El niño proletario” de Osvaldo Lamborghini como una reflexión ideológica sobre la complicidad entre literatura y violencia. Mediante la inspección del estilo lingüístico del narrador asesino, este trabajo propone que el cuento de Lamborghini presenta la escritura como una forma de expresión vinculada a la violencia y acusa a la tradición literaria hispanoamericana, específicamente al naturalismo y al modernismo, de participar en la violencia social que el relato denuncia. De esta manera, el sustrato ideológico del cuento de Lamborghini va más allá del desmonte de la tradicional dicotomía civilización-barbarie, …
Disease, Extinction, And Emergences In T.C. Boyle’S Friend Of Earth And Margaret Atwood’S Oryx And Crake, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Disease, Extinction, And Emergences In T.C. Boyle’S Friend Of Earth And Margaret Atwood’S Oryx And Crake, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
In this essay, we address Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000) and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) as climate fiction that plays out equally devastating yet realistic futuristic scenarios. In creative thought experiments, science fiction helps us to recognize humans as a collective force, a force that conquers, shapes, destroys, and rebuilds the planet in pre- and post-apocalyptic bouts not unlike the pre- and post-pandemic times we are now experiencing. Our focus on these two science fiction novels is on the intersectionality of emergent environments, extinctions, and diseases within the framework of climate change.
Goethes Pflanzen Und Das ,,Dunkle Griin", Heather I. Sullivan
Goethes Pflanzen Und Das ,,Dunkle Griin", Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Abstract: In Goethe's works, plants abound; as such, they offer many insights for this critical plant studies project on plants and humans in the early Anthropocene. From Werther and die Novelle to Hermann und Dorothea, Faust and his scientific writings, we find three categories of plant depictions: first as embodiments of green vitality that elicit emotional responses; second, as humanly-shaped cultivations or horticultural realms; and third, we find inklings of the promise of actual vegetal agency establishing the very world in which we human beings and all other animals live. In Goethe's wide-ranging botanical ideas, the modern collision between …
Is Green The New Red? Marxism, Ecology, And Contemporary Architectural Theory, Curtis Swope
Is Green The New Red? Marxism, Ecology, And Contemporary Architectural Theory, Curtis Swope
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
This essay examines the role of Marxist concepts in recent architectural theories of ecology using two architecture firms, Estudio Teddy Cruz and Sauerbruch Hutton (SH), as case studies. In their writings, Cruz and SH mobilize the critique of capital, a dialectical materialist understanding of history, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of functionalist culture for the theorization of sustainable design. Their work has two vital ramifications for current sustainability discourses in two different fields which this essay seeks to bridge. For Marxist theorists concerned about ecology but averse to Western Marxism because of its supposed idealism, Cruz and SH show anew …
Introducción, M. R. Jácome, Ana María Mutis
Introducción, M. R. Jácome, Ana María Mutis
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
La Voz Del Torturador Y La Burocracia Del Terror En La Ùltima Conquista De El Ángel De Elvira Orphée, Ana María Mutis
La Voz Del Torturador Y La Burocracia Del Terror En La Ùltima Conquista De El Ángel De Elvira Orphée, Ana María Mutis
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
Petro-Texts, Plants, And People In The Anthropocene: The Dark Green, Heather I. Sullivan
Petro-Texts, Plants, And People In The Anthropocene: The Dark Green, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The ‘dark green’ refers to the green plant-human relationships that undergird human cultures as well as the darkly petroleum-fueled industrialization, mass species extinctions, and strange new ecosystems in the Anthropocene. I consider briefly three petro-culture novels based on various ‘road trips’ that explicitly address both the long-term and massive, albeit oft-ignored, ecological power of plants whether in living vegetal form or in their rotted, processed form of petroleum products: Frank Herbert’s Dune, portraying worm ‘spice’ as a stand-in for oil; Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, eliminating all energy and plant life leaving only hungry humans; and Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli …
El Abrazo De La Serpiente O La Re-Escritura Del Amazonas Dentro De Una Ética Ecológica Y Poscolonial, Ana María Mutis
El Abrazo De La Serpiente O La Re-Escritura Del Amazonas Dentro De Una Ética Ecológica Y Poscolonial, Ana María Mutis
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
At first glance the Colombian film El Abrazo de la Serpiente (2015) is about the encounter of two cultures with two divergent visions of the world: the indigenous people of the Amazon and the foreign scientists who explored the region during the first half of the twentieth century. This study proposes that Ciro Guerra’s film is also a commentary on how to write about the Amazon. This is supported by the metafictional strategies deployed by the film which, based on the revision and refiguration of the scientific texts that inspired it, simulates the construction of a document that adheres to …
Goethe's Colors: Revolutionary Optics And The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
Goethe's Colors: Revolutionary Optics And The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Renowned poet and author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) claimed that his greatest contribution to the world was not his famous Faust (Part I in 1808 and Part II in 1832) or his best-selling 1774 epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther [Sorrows of Young Werther], the first German novel to achieve international fame, but was instead his scientific treatise on optics and colors, Zur Farbenlehre [Towards a Theory of Color] from 1810.
Introduction To German Ecocriticism In The Anthropocene, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Introduction To German Ecocriticism In The Anthropocene, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
How do we approach, read, discuss, and teach German literature in light of the transnational and global environmental problems and crises caused by human activities? In what way does the current geological era of the Anthropocene marked by traceable human impact across the globe lead us to reflect on the role and interconnectedness of human and non-human forces? Since human activities and human cultures have caused so many of the current ecological problems, how can scholars address broad-scale interdisciplinary problems with attention to both cultural and scientific knowledge? What is the role of the humanities in this inextricably nature-culture mix …
The Dark Pastoral: A Trope For The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
The Dark Pastoral: A Trope For The Anthropocene, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Denoting our current age as the Anthropocene, or the era of planet-wide human impact, scales up human agency beyond the usual biological capacity of all living things to alter their surroundings to a geological force. Human activities have altered vast areas of the Earth's terrestrial surfaces, spread industrial particulates across the globe, and impacted the planetary climate with increased release of carbon dioxide that then increases oceanic acidity bleaching entire coral reefs. The biosphere's land, air, and water have all changed with the increased release and use of energy. Once again, a species of living things has become a large-scale …
Threatening Animals?, Heather I. Sullivan
Threatening Animals?, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Threatening predators and pernicious beasts continue to play significant roles in the human imaginary even as human threats to other species increase exponentially in the age of Anthropocene. While posthumanist animal studies and material ecocriticism sync human and other animals within the biosphere’s living interactions, our shared material reciprocity is currently skewing ever more towards the human threat to other species – and so to ourselves as co-dependents. This essay explores the meaning of “threatening” and “threatened”. Five German texts presenting human-animal interactions in the Anthropocene’s span by Goethe, Kafka, Stifter, Duve, and Trojanow unsettle expectations of threats. In Goethe’s …
Prisiones Y Afectos: Reescrituras Visuales Del Cuerpo Encarcelado En La Producción Documental Mexicana Contemporánea, Rosana Blanco Cano
Prisiones Y Afectos: Reescrituras Visuales Del Cuerpo Encarcelado En La Producción Documental Mexicana Contemporánea, Rosana Blanco Cano
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Este trabajo analiza documentales que desarrollan estrategias visuales y discursivas centradas en expresividad afectiva y corporal de individuos marcados por el encierro carcelario. Interesa en particular los trabajos Mi vida dentro (Lucía Gajá, 2007) y Teatro Penitenciario. Libertad desde la sombra (Carlos González/Pablo Ramírez Durón, 2011) que consideran, respectivamente, experiencias emocionales derivadas de una íntima relación con registros fotográficos y teatralidad. Al centrar la experiencia afectiva que al mismo tiempo se conjuga con la experiencia del cuerpo (Hardt 2007), estos trabajos construyen repositorios de emociones donde los “socialmente ausentes” (Foster 2013) acceden a espacios expresivos alternativos donde se confirma …
Imperial Incentives And Individual Allegiances In Juan Antonio Correa’S La Pérdida Y Restauración De Bahía De Todos Los Santos, Matthew D. Stroud
Imperial Incentives And Individual Allegiances In Juan Antonio Correa’S La Pérdida Y Restauración De Bahía De Todos Los Santos, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Juan Antonio Correa's La pérdida y restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santos, written primarily to celebrate the successful recapture in 1625 of an important American colony from the Dutch and their allies, invites an investigation into why and how human beings can be motivated to support people and institutions that not only do not directly benefit them but may in fact operate in ways that are unfavourable to their own lives and causes. Informed by the political writings of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, this study explores the various reasons why …
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 …
The Cornelian Ethics Of Flight And The Case Of Horace, Nina Ekstein
The Cornelian Ethics Of Flight And The Case Of Horace, Nina Ekstein
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Flight is a simple dramatic action, one that lends itself to any number of different plots. its implied movement can be represented on stage or merely recounted. So common is it that the words fuite and fuir appear in every one of Corneille’s 32 plays, from as infrequently as twice to as many as 32 times.1 The two terms belong to a broad semantic network including retraite, éviter, dérober, échapper, partir, quitter, abandoner, but differ in their suggestion of abrupt, precipitous movement as well as the element of fear implied. furetière begins …
Nature And The "Dark Pastoral" In Goethe's Werther, Heather I. Sullivan
Nature And The "Dark Pastoral" In Goethe's Werther, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
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 …
Human And Non-Human Agencies In The Anthropocene, G. Dürbeck, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Human And Non-Human Agencies In The Anthropocene, G. Dürbeck, Caroline Schaumann, Heather I. Sullivan
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
The era of human impact throughout the Earth’s biosphere since the Industrial Revolution that has recently been named the Anthropocene poses many challenges to the humanities, particularly in terms of human and non-human agency. Using diverse examples from literature, travel reflections, and science that document a wide range of agencies beyond the human including landscape, ice, weather, volcanic energy or gastropods, and insects, this essay seeks to formulate a broader sense of agency. All of our examples probe new kinds of relationships between humans and nature. By configuring a close interconnection and interdependence between these entities, the Anthropocene discourse defines …
Coming Home: The Latina/O Queer Zone Of Comfort, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Coming Home: The Latina/O Queer Zone Of Comfort, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
An autobiographical account about accepting and utlilizing the multifaceted aspects of one's identity as queers of color in order to transform one's community.
Music And Migratory Subjects In Pedro Almodóvar’S Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Hable Con Ella, And Volver, Debra J. Ochoa
Music And Migratory Subjects In Pedro Almodóvar’S Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Hable Con Ella, And Volver, Debra J. Ochoa
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
A film criticism is presented for the Spanish films "Todo sobre mi madre," "Hable con ella," and "Volver," all by film director, screen writer, and producer Pedro Almodóvar. It focuses particularly on Almodóvar's use of international music and his interest in immigrants and their cultural influences on Spain.
"¡Ay, Reino Mal Gobernado!": The Monarchy In Mira De Amescua’S Las Desgracias Del Rey Don Alfonso, El Casto, Matthew D. Stroud
"¡Ay, Reino Mal Gobernado!": The Monarchy In Mira De Amescua’S Las Desgracias Del Rey Don Alfonso, El Casto, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Until relatively recently, the conventional wisdom regarding the comedia held that the vast and remarkable cultural production of Spain’s Golden Age not only mirrored its political dominance but served as imperial propaganda in the effort to project the Hapsburg monarchy, the Castilian language, the Iberian political and economic systems, and the Roman Catholic religion both at home and abroad. More recent scholarship has found the relationship between imperial cultural production, politics, and society to be much more complicated, porous, and nuanced. Baroque art and literature teem with representations of racial and sexual diversity, class distinctions, and national identities, and the …
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
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
“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, …
Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands: Heroic Women Of The Early Reconquest In The Spanish Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands: Heroic Women Of The Early Reconquest In The Spanish Comedia, Matthew D. Stroud
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
Against the backdrop of the uncertain and troubling history of Christian Spain at the turn of the ninth century, three comedias highlight the heroic deeds of the women of Asturias and León. In Lope de Vega’s Las doncellas de Simancas, women who are to be sent as tribute to the Emir of Córdoba sever their own hands, threaten suicide, and ultimately lead the resistance against the barbaric exchange. In Las famosas asturianas, also by Lope, Sancha, selected, as well, for delivery to the Moors, shames her countrymen by appearing undressed before them but not in the presence of …
The Death Of The River And The River Of Death: The Magdalena River In El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Cólera And La Novia Oscura, Ana María Mutis
The Death Of The River And The River Of Death: The Magdalena River In El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Cólera And La Novia Oscura, Ana María Mutis
Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research
This essay focuses on two of these works: El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) by Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez (hereinafter Amor) and La novia oscura (The Dark Bride) by Laura Restrepo (hereinafter Novia). Though it is true that these novels coincide in presenting the Magdalena as the scene of Colombia's deterioration and destruction, the river of Novia explores the connections between natural space, individual conscience, and national reality, all the while commenting on, and questioning, the message the Magdalena is made to convey in Amor. The analysis that follows seeks to …