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https://doi.org/10.17234/SEC.36.9
“The black garden”: W.S. Merwin’s ecopoetics of Capitalocene mass extinction (Summary)
Simon Ryle
Sažetak
This paper explores the representation of mass extinction in W.S. Merwin’s
ecopoetics, in particular the affective flatness of Merwin’s poetics of natural devastation. Focusing on this formal technique, the paper investigates how, in Merwin’s collections The Lice (1967) and The Rain in the Trees (1988), the failure to apprehend extinction is a normative epistemic effect itself caused by mass extinction. The paper links Merwin’s technique with a similar logic of ecological and cultural exhaustion, in recent eco-socialist accounts of Marx’s “metabolic rift” that – it is claimed – drives on the Capitalocene’s accelerating commodification of nature. Methodologically, the paper combines ecocritical and eco-socialist research on mass extinction with aesthetic theories of negation proposed by Adorno, Blanchot, Rancière, and Byung-Chul Han. In his concept of “the disaster,” for example, Blanchot has theorized a form of the disastrous that actively functions to negate thought and writing. The disaster involves a limit to writing; it “de-scribes” as Blanchot puts it, because disastrousness is to be defined by its tendency to withdraw from the possibility of description. A similar unspeakable darkness can be seen recurrently in the “black garden” of Merwin’s poetics of ecocide. By tracing the erasure of nature, approaching the ecological disaster that cannot be apprehended, this paper claims that Merwin’s black garden “de-scribes” ecocide in order to contest the indifference of late modern culture to the mass extinction of the Capitalocene.
Ključne riječi
ecopoetics; Capitalocene; ecocode; mass extinction; negation
Hrčak ID:
325682
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.12.2024.
Posjeta: 18 *