SESIÓN DE ENSEÑANZA APRENDIZAJE N° 7 I DATOS INFORMATIVOS:

Rosemary Rowley Irish poet [email protected]

A sequence on love - political, personal, sexual and ecological, asking questions on the possibility of saving the world, and the whole damn thing..

As we gaze from the portals of the past, to wake the dead, and look to the future, for the awakening of spirit..

Written in l987, reflecting on the events of the ‘sixties, seventies, and eighties

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FIVE – our heroine ponders further on the nature of human love – does it encourage self-interest, consumerism, and therefore pollution?

If human love is only based on sex Why is it such a feeling only wrecks The state, the law, the constabulary Attested for, time and again, in voluntary Contributions to the free press. It seems People are only really themselves in dreams, And seldom think of any society

Save in terms of respectable sobriety.

So forget fellow-feeling, what’s held in common It’s like the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon

And claimed all his. All now wish to own Everything they see, or take a loan. Sharing is now an idle vision

Best endured while watching television. So annihilation is the structure of the whole If we are given over to selfish goal,

Conquest, conspiracy, exploitation Murder, pillage, and infiltration. The past excesses of extinct society Were bent with its own satiety -

What’s left but conquering neighbour’s lands

Intimidation, weapons, not loving bands,

No wholesome hearts to expand without friction Trying to prove that war is just a fiction.

Not so at all. Instead we have the spectacle Of warring nations, and peace lovers ramshackle. Swords into ploughshares! What optimism. Did someone say light breaks up in a prism? To survive, we must expand the caring zone, Embrace others we would not call our own. When we rush to buy a motor car

Remember, though we travel very far

We leave unfriendly fumes, pillage the earth For which future generations will feel dearth. The honking snakes of traffic in a city

For perambulating babies have no pity, The layer of ozone in the stratosphere Is diminishing for sure, year by year, Hamburgers are eating into forests Acid rain is making stone quite porous The bombs are piling up – while a homily Tells us all that is important is our family.

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Appeasing the voracious household god Is simply now a matter of the right wad Of notes. The world may yet turn desert If unhappy couples continue to subvert Nature, and her wise house-keeping way. Future generations will have to pay –

Unless, of course, someone drops the bomb And the world itself become an ashen tomb!

God spare us, but ‘twould perplex you,

Pain, terrorise, affright and vex you –

But something in our purpose is germane To this most overwhelming side-track: the main Thrust of my argument is why people

Feel love is only congruent ‘neath a steeple.

The kernel of the matter is what people feel - Romantic Love – is selfish and unreal. Let those who wish to exploit, do so.

Do they deserve their riches? Rousseau

Gave us a common humanity outside the state,

But it’s enough for me that I tolerate my mate

And reign supreme in my own front room, It has no view, save the TV, and the tomb. And then when we build our air-raid shelter

We’ll have it so when we run helter-skelter

And the sirens sounding, there’ll be a few

Left of us, perhaps just me and you. So therefore, the idea of man and wife, Somehow always ends up in strife. So science is the genius for our age, It governs life at every stage

From neonatology to the mortician’s skill,

Reproduction, from sterility to the pill.

Two-headed monkeys, smoking dogs, and worse

Obscenities which wouldn’t decorate a verse, Pets with eyes burning with chemicals

Just to show us what brand of syrup kills Rats climbing on endless treadmills,

To the desired end we should understand all ills. Science has made babies in test-tubes,

And with mammeoplasty can construct new boobs,

Science has made these bombs, without God’s adduction To bring abut his gorgeous world’s destruction.

The good fairy at birth, was in no hurry, First time to learn language, less a worry,

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Truth the by-product, our onlie begetter. Yet when people let science go to their heads They put everyone in different beds -

A definition to shred common humanity Separating us and them, you and me.

Discrimination is our culture’s crown

Best when worn upside down.

To celebrate diversity should be our aim, Not sacrificing people to the game

Of science, but with our best love hurled To welcome each child into the world.

Postscript by the poet Rosemarie Rowley publishing the poem at the present time 2019.

"I feel that vulnerable young people are not to blame, rather it is the big banks, companies and advertisers that have created this false reality of consumerism and marketed through sexual images, signs and language. This is in the poem an oblique means of getting at this truth through irony which does not diminish the genuine love young people feel for each other. At the present time young people show every sign of waking up"

V ol 10 , N o 2 Julia Ditter

University of Freiburg, Germany [email protected]

Reinhard Henning, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman, eds., Nordic Narratives of

Nature and the Environment.Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and

Cultures (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 252pp.

Despite the fact that the Nordic countries are internationally regarded as the forerunners of ecologically sustainable societies, there have not so far been many studies engaging critically with the origins and the factual background of this notion of Nordic environmental exceptionalism, especially outside of scholarship written in the Scandinavian languages. Even after ecocritical research has shifted its focus to consider various geographical regions and scales, non-Anglophone literatures have not yet found their way into the centre of ecocritical interest. Nordic Narratives of Nature and the

Environment is the first collection of ecocritical research on northern European literatures

written in the English language. The collection aims to bring the fruitful research area of Nordic ecocriticism closer both to those already working in the field of Scandinavian studies and to those unfamiliar with this field. In their introduction, Reinhard Hennig, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman provide a short outline of the ethnic and linguistic groups comprising the Nordic countries, the various ways in which they are interconnected, and sketch out Scandinavian culture and history since the nineteenth century. This establishes a solid middle ground between experts on Scandinavia and those readers with a main focus on other geographical areas who want gain an introductory overview of the field.

The aim of the collection is to interrogate the construction of the Nordic regions’

green image, to examine the degree to which the mediated narrative of environmental exceptionalism corresponds to sociocultural and historical realities, and to illustrate counter-narratives. It is structured around three sub-themes: Nordic Anthropocene narratives, language and aesthetics, and environmental justice. Within these overarching thematic blocks, the collection assembles articles that focus on a variety of genres, such

as children’s literature and dystopian fiction, as they appear in environmental cultural

texts. Even though the novel appears as the most prominent object of analysis, the collection also includes chapters on film, photography, nonfiction writing, poetry, video installations, and even the narratives created through cultural preservation projects. It thereby highlights the multiplicity of narrative forms that play a role in the construction of Nordic natures. The sub-themes of the collection are further expanded through the inclusion of sub-fields of environmental studies such as critical plant studies, human- animal studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. Despite this vast array of perspectives, the collection does not create a feeling of disorientation but is visibly

Cultures V ol 10 , N o 2

structured around several common themes running through all of its chapters. Contemporary anxieties and concerns around attempts to understand the world in the age of the Anthropocene form a central part of most chapters, often in connection with the notion of modern risk society, the vulnerability and precarity of ecosystems, and a perspective on environmental concerns that moves across local, national, global and even planetary scales.

Within these debates, and in connection with scaling, the articles of the collection negotiate the situatedness of the works they examine within the special geographical, historical, and socio-political context of the Nordic countries while at the same time questioning the notion of the Nordic itself. As Katie Ritson argues in her chapter on Kjersti

Vik’s novel Mandø, set on a Danish Wadden Sea island of the same name that is characterised by its liminal and precarious geography, reading texts solely within their production context as Scandinavian literature discards their global relevance and neglects the fact that an environmental perspective necessarily transcends the notion of the nation

state: “Nordic literature/culture as standpoint is limiting, because it necessarily has

humans at the centre of its definition” (73). In congruence with Ritson’s argument, the

question of the reconceptualisation of nation states in an age of ecological crisis is addressed implicitly and explicitly throughout the collection. Many of the analyses further reveal connections between Scandinavian and canonical Anglophone narratives about the environment, highlighting similarities as well as differences and pointing towards the fruitful approach of looking at narratives about the environment from a wider European

perspective and even beyond Europe. As Cheryl J. Fish’s chapter on Liselotte Wajstedt and Marja Helander’s indigenous photography and film demonstrates, locally produced

ecomedia that are disseminated globally can engage in cultural work on a global scale and further communication between (indigenous) activists and artists around the world. New concepts introduced within the collection can be integrated productively into ecocritical research more widely, and are not limited to Scandinavian studies or even necessarily the

study of specific media forms. Cheryl J. Fish proposes the term of “elegiac ecojustice” to describe media that combine an “image-world where human relationships to nature are

disastrous” with the suggestion of “alternative outcomes and political agency” (210) and

take into account issues of environmental injustice. Similarly, Beatrice M. G. Reed

introduces the productive concept of “ecomorphism” which, aside from describing “a

figural transmission of meaning from a natural or ecological to a human sphere” can also

be understood as an overarching concept to structure ecological tropes and includes a variety of sub-categories such as geomorphism or aquamorphism (129).

In the current age of ecological crisis, ecocriticism needs to engage in broader discussions that move beyond the notion that environmental politics can be isolated through the notion of nation states. The collection provides an example of how this might be possible and succeeds in its aim to promote an interest in its audience to engage in comparative studies by destabilising conventional bordering concepts. Nordic Narratives

of Nature and the Environment is an intriguing and comprehensive collection that makes

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can only hope that it will encourage further ecocritical research in Northern European literatures.