How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction

289 Pages·2021·4.34 MB·English

by  Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, Martin Karlsson Pedersen

How Literature Comes to Matter
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New Materialisms
Series editors: Iris van der Tuin and Rosi Braidotti
New Materialisms asks how materiality permits representation, actualises
ethical subjectivities and innovates the political. The series will provide a dis-
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Marie-Luise Angerer, Karen Barad, Corinna Bath, Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman,
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Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange
Helen Palmer
Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama
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How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction
Edited by Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen and Martin
Karlsson Pedersen
Visit the series web page at: edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/nmat
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How Literature Comes
to Matter
Post-Anthropocentric Approaches
to Fiction
Edited by Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson
Marcussen and Martin Karlsson Pedersen
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial
and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more
information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson
Marcussen and Martin Karlsson Pedersen, 2021
© the chapters their several authors, 2021
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by
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printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 6131 3 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 6134 4 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 6133 7 (epub)
The right of Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen and Martin Karlsson
Pedersen to be identifi ed as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related
Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction 1
Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen and
Martin Karlsson Pedersen
I. Matter-Oriented Perspectives on Literary Techniques,
Language and Representation
1. The Abundance of Things in the Midst of Writing:
A Post-Anthropocentric View on Description and
Georges Perec’s ‘Still Life/Style Leaf’ 31
Marlene Karlsson Marcussen
2. Slow Narrative and the Perception of Material Forms 49
Marco Caracciolo
II. Object Intrusions in Subject-Centric Texts
3. Aisthetic Realities in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful
Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Matter-Oriented Reading of
Postcolonial Literature 73
Sten Pultz Moslund
4. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’: On the Hostile Nature of Things 93
Michael Karlsson Pedersen
5. ‘We have nothing to be arrogant about’ – Hans Christian
Andersen and Anti-Anthropocentrism 109
Torsten Bøgh Thomsen
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vi contents
III. Carnal Realities: Lively Flesh in Feminist and Queer Readings
6. Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies:
Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist
Literary Criticism and (Post)Critique 131
Tobias Skiveren
7. Djuna Barnes and Queer Interiorities 153
Laura Oulanne
8. Corporeal Creativity and Queer Gaps in Time 172
Karin Sellberg
IV. Capitalism, Crisis and the Anthropocene
9. Putting the Earth to Use: Reading Resources in the
End Times (Through Science Fiction) 193
Rune Graulund
10. Dry Ontology and Finance Capitalism: A Material–Affective
Reading of Financial Crisis Fiction 214
Martin Karlsson Pedersen
11. The Work of Art in the Age of Capitalist Realism:
Materiality/Aura/Apocalypse 236
Maurizia Boscagli
Afterword: Woodenness – The (Palm) Heart of the Matter 257
Timothy Morton
Index 266
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Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank everyone in the Materiality, Literature and
Aesthetics research programme at the University of Southern Denmark
for our exciting discussions and peer feedback on several chapters in
the book.
We thank Iris van der Tuin and Rosi Braidotti for their suggestions
of contributors to the book.
We would also like to thank Nobrow Press for granting us permis-
sion to include four images from Jon McNaught’s Kingdom in Marco
Caracciolo’s Chapter 2.
While working on Chapter 2, ‘Slow Narrative and the Perception of
Material Forms’, Marco Caracciolo received funding from the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 714166).
Laura Oulanne would like to thank the Alfred Kordelin Foundation
for supporting the research from which her contribution, ‘Djuna Barnes
and Queer Interiorities’, stems.
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Preface
The making of this book began in the small collective research pro-
gramme Materiality, Literature and Aesthetics, at the Institute for the
Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). The
three-year programme (running from September 2015 to August 2018)
was chaired by Sten Moslund and numbered twenty-plus participants
at its peak, with various degrees of affi liation, and a steady core group
of twelve members. Materiality, Literature and Aesthetics was a pro-
gramme whose aim was to bring together scholars at the University
of Southern Denmark who were interested in the material turn and
post-anthropocentric theory and the way they continue to signifi cantly
impact contemporary developments in the humanities.
From the outset, the main ambition of the programme was to explore
ways in which post-anthropocentric theory might create new and inno-
vative approaches to literature and, vice versa, how the ontological and
epistemological complexities of art and literature might contribute to
theoretical explorations of matter, objects and all sorts of entanglements
between the non-human and human histories, cultures and societies.
Our meetings will be remembered for their lively discussions of texts
by Jane Bennett, Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, Maurizia Boscagli,
Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Vicki Kirby, Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo,
Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Bill Brown, all in combination with
literary texts by writers such as Virginia Woolf, H. P. Lovecraft, Francis
Ponge, Jeff VanderMeer and Paolo Bacigalupi. Although such theoretical
voices represent a very broad spectrum of post-anthropocentric theory
with very different conceptualisations – and contextualisations – of mat-
ter and objects and more-than-human realities, the programme appre-
ciated their common ground as a radical reappraisal of phenomena,
such as place, nature, the body and material manifestations of reality,
whether it happens in examinations of such phenomena in themselves or
the ways in which they infl uence, condition and co-create human ways
of being-in-the-world.
However, as we ploughed through one text after another, which
would often refer to the signifi cance of literature and offer more or less
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preface ix
sketchy illustrations of post-anthropocentric philosophy with literary
examples, we kept being struck by the absence of more sustained and
in-depth analyses of literary works or close readings that would try out
and experiment with various ways of reading literature through post-
anthropocentric lenses. The wish for a book that would do such a thing
is what brought us to make the present volume, half of which consists
of contributions by participants in the programme while the other half
is made up of contributions by scholars from around the world who
were personally invited to write a chapter in their particular areas of
expertise.
Another central ambition of the SDU research programme that should
be mentioned, because it has made its mark on the book, is the aim
of assisting young scholars in their careers. Several PhD students were
among the core participants as well as great talents in pursuit of PhD
stipends, which, in Denmark as elsewhere in the world, are increasingly
hard to come by in the fi eld of literature. Several of these young scholars
have given shape to the book with chapters that signifi cantly contribute
to the present task of developing the study of literature with the expan-
sion of realities that is brought about by post-anthropocentric theory.
When the Materiality, Literature and Aesthetics research programme
ended in 2018, a new programme, Anthropocene Aesthetics, took its
place, chaired by Rune Graulund, which now carries on some of the
work on New Materialism and matter realities that has laid the founda-
tion of the current book, but, as the name of the programme suggests,
with a special focus on literary studies in relation to global warming,
ecocriticism, posthuman and animal studies and genres such as weird
fi ction, nature writing and climate fi ction.
The last thing we wish to say before the book begins, and speaking
on behalf of all the authors in the book, is that the work offered here is
not to be seen as an arrival but rather as a contribution to the beginning
of the expansion of the study of literature with the increased reality per-
spectives of post-anthropocentric theory – and vice versa – which, in our
view, is still at a pioneering stage. In that light, we hope that the book
will bring a spark to that general endeavour, trigger new questions and
help open new avenues for future research.
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