Ecocriticism as Subversive Aesthetics

Authors

  • Jelka Kernev Štrajn

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i20.321

Keywords:

anthropocentrism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, minoritarian literature, untimely, subversiveness

Abstract

Art is subversive when it crosses the boundary of the generally acceptable, though over time such art can and does become mainstream. A much more complicated question is what is subversive in aesthetics? Ecocriticism has already become, along with ecofeminism and animal studies, an academic discipline. It can be defined as subversive if it is understood in terms of an attitude, which is not anthropocentric. And here is the catch: how can the human also encompass the alien? The question that emerges here is all but rhetorical: how can we decentre and amplify our human consciousness and perspective to include zoocentric, biocentric or geocentric positions? At this point the contemporary theory creates contrasting opinions, which cross the boundaries of aesthetics, poetics and ecocriticism since they reach out to the fields of metaphysics and antimetaphysics. Within the phenomenon of perception the other always appears, as Deleuze said in his Logic of Sense, as “a priori Other”. We have to deal, henceforth, with a kind of pre-reflexive level of consciousness and amplified sensory perception, which, as we know, is the basic condition of artistic creation. Thus, this paper – because it seeks to penetrate into the node of these questions – takes literary art as its starting point. In the spirit of the above-mentioned observations, I have attempted to investigate in ‘minority literature’ (female authors of contemporary Polish and Slovene literature) how this decentred attitude, which Jure Detela, a Slovene poet, poetically defined, corresponds to our thesis on a particular ecocritical stream, which can be defined as an ecofeminist aesthetics. The ‘minoritarian literature’ here is meant exclusively in the sense that was defined by Deleuze and Guattari’s books Kafka and A Thousand Plateaus.

 

Article received: April 12, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

Author Biography

Jelka Kernev Štrajn

Freelance literary critic and translator, Ljubljana
Slovenia

Jelka Kernev Štrajn is a freelance literary critic, comparatist and translator in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She translated works of de Man, Bourdieu, Lacan, Laclau, Lefort, Foucault, Leclercq, Mme de Stäel, Deleuze and Guattari, C. Malabou, etc. For many years she commented on contemporary Slovene literature, especially poetry. She is also the author of several introductions to literary works and theoretical treatises (on narratology, feminist literary theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, ecocriticism and animal studies). In the year 2009, she published a book, The Renaissance of Allegory: allegory, symbol, fragment (Ljubljana, ZRC SAZU). She coedited a number of thematic issues of the journal Primerjalna književnost (Comparative literature), and in 2013 she co-edited a book Ecology through Poetry, issued in Calcutta (Sampark). She co-organised several international conferences, dedicated to poetry and literary theory.

References

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Published

15.10.2019

How to Cite

Kernev Štrajn, J. (2019). Ecocriticism as Subversive Aesthetics. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, (20), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i20.321

Issue

Section

Main Topic: Contemporary Aesthetics of Media and Post-Media Art Practices