humcore midterm

ontological vulnerability

fundamental condition of all human beings

• someone is vulnerable simply by virtue of being human, and thus having a body (body = physical, social, psychological needs = can be harmed)

artificial vulnerability

bias, discrimination, violence

• humans are rendered vulnerable through the systems/institutions imposed purely by their own society (“unnatural” vulnerability)

tentacular thinking

a model of decentralized, non- binary, and non-hierarchical thinking that emphasizes interconnectedness rather than bounded individualism

porous self

a self that is permeable to outside influences (social, spiritual, etc.); not wholly self-sufficient as the buffered self stresses

buffered self

“the possibility exists of taking a distance
from, disengaging from everything
outside the mind . . . As a bounded self I
can see the boundary as a buffer, such
that the things beyond don’t need to ‘get
to me,’ to use the contemporary
expression . . . The self can see itself as
invulnerable, as master of the meanings
of things for it.” (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age 38)

precarity

the condition of being precarious

• dependent on unknown conditions or chance circumstances

• characterized by a lack of security or stability

• “The condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves.” -Anna Tsing

contingent

dependent on or determined by conditions, rather than being necessary or inevitable

• the meaning of nature is not fixed/universal

• thus, ideas about nature can change

speculative fabulation

a kind of storytelling that, similar to science fiction, explores alternative realities and challenges existing norms to cultivate new ways of thinking

• need not be “fictional”: can include academic, journalistic, and personal forms of writing

sublimation

modification of an instinctual impulse into a more socially acceptable form

dark ecology

focus on the unsettling and complex entanglement of humans with nature; difficult to easily resolve its problems

• three layers:

  • dark-depressing (ex: animal extinction)

  • dark-uncanny (ex: the “strange strangers” of nature)

  • dark-sweet (ex: ecognosis)

role reversals

primarily seen through Lady Bertilak’s seductions of Gawain, essentially “feminizing” Gawain (her forwardness and dominance + his passiveness)

• reinforced by Gawain’s absence from Lord Bertilak’s hunt and his “manly” activities

hybridity

a blend of diverse elements

• SGGK: “a half-giant”, “but handsome, too… he was finely formed”, “his stomach and waist were slender and sleek”, dressed in ermine coat (symbol of royalty)

anthropocentrism

regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence, especially as opposed to God or animals

biocentrism

the view or belief that the rights and needs of humans are not more important than those of other living things; life is universal and thus the integral value, rendering every organism equal

New Materialism

a field of study that challenges the traditional separation between mind and matter by emphasizing the agency, vitality, and interconnectedness of all material entities—both living and non-living—in constituting the world

timescales

periods of time depicting changes in the environment (hours to millions of years); directly related to climate change

• driven by natural processes and anthropogenic actions

• variability in the strength and speed of changes, depending on what factors propel them

cosmology

a story about origins (ex: “Skywoman Falling”, the Bible’s Genesis/Adam and Eve, Mother Nature/nature’s femininity)

• can represent humans’ relationship to the more-than-human world

interlaced narratives

literary technique of interweaving multiple story/plot lines together

• use of switching between the parallel narrative events (Bertilak’s hunts to Gawain’s seductions, and vice versa)

prismatic ecology

developed by ecotheorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, urges to include the other “colors” (rather than just green) in context of the environment

• consider the unknown and the ugly just as much as the picturesque qualities of nature

human exceptionalism

the anthropocentric belief that humans are fundamentally superior to and separate from all other forms of life, justifying human dominance over the natural world

assemblage

• a critique of human-focused theories of agency

• enables us to see how human and more-than-human entities act together and share responsibility

ecognosis

ecological consciousness that allows for someone to become accustomed to the strangeness of the natural world, yet not necessarily in a comfortable manner

• Timothy Morton: a disorienting process of knowing

trans-corporeality

humans are inevitably and constantly shaped by their material environment

• constant exchanges of air, water, chemicals, etc. between them and the environment

ecocriticism

analyzing literary texts through an ecological lens

the environmental humanities

a branch of humanistic inquiry that situates human life within the context of a broader ecosystem

backward speculation

“a theory of history”

• “The past reminds us that change can occur.” - Natalie Zemon Davis

the Green Man

an architectural and art motif resembling a man’s face surrounded by plants and foliage

• a decorative figure/Pagan entity dating back to pre-Christianity

• represents fertility of the land and rebirth; a symbol of resurrection (thus garnering appeal to European Christians for its connection to Jesus)

• deconstructs binary self-perceptions of humanity (challenges the understanding of who we are vs. everything else around us; plants ARE us!)

misogyny in SGGK

Gawain’s adamant blame onto primarily Lady Bertilak (for tempting him into sin) and also Morgan le Fay (for her magical deception)

• misogyny rooted in refusal of ecognosis; “a particularly vehement form of resistance to the ecological, which radically threatens sovereign virility.” -Dinshaw

  • masculinity’s refusal of its dependency upon the feminine = refusal of the natural world (Mother Nature)

slow violence

term coined by Rob Nixon; the causes of climate change are immensely drawn out and nearly indiscernible (ex: lingering nuclear fallout, centuries-worth of greenhouse gas buildup)

• these processes can only be “seen” through its effects; even then they might only be seen decades/centuries later

taxonomy

a system of classification; sorting into categories

• ex: how we distinguish forms of life (animal kingdoms), kinds of climate systems (tropical vs. temperate, etc.), subgenres/subcategories of literature

weird fiction

characterized by dark, supernatural stories not traditionally aligned with sci-fi, fantasy, gothic, etc. genre conventions

• ambiguous supernatural element placed in realistic setting

• thematicizes the difficulties of categorization (is the phenomenon supernatural or mundane? real or fantasy?)

• can be difficult to categorize as a genre itself

the sublime

the feeling we get when we encounter something with what we perceive as beautiful, but with such an immense degree that it invokes profound awe and even terror

• Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) > terror is the ruling principle of the sublime (in reaction to our ongoing discoveries about a vast and essentially infinite nature)

• an awe that tips from the appreciation of nature’s beauty to a feeling of horror

Amitav Ghosh

“Make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture…Our will be remembered as a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.”

• culture CONCEALS >> the stories that we tell matter!

David Wallace-Wells

“What does it mean to be entertained by a fictional apocalypse as we stare down the possibility of a real one?… One job of pop culture is always to serve stories that distract even as they appear to enagge—to deliver sublimation and diversion.”

• culture DISTRACTS >> the stories that we tell matter!

Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement

• recognition: “a passage from ignorance to knowledge…an already existing knowledge that makes possible [the passage]… [the knowledge] arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself”

  • can come about in our observation of vast ecological changes; we’ve become familiarized with and cognizant of the tumultuousness of nature, thus we recognize the “non-human” as increasingly more alive as we notice the familiarity of such events

• contemporary culture (literature, politics) has failed to grasp the severity and imminence of climate change

David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth

• the climate crisis is continuously worsened by a multitude of anthropogenic factors

  • refusal of responsibility/blame shifting, misplacement of concern, complacency, poor portrayal in media, appetite for more/selfish comfort, scientific reticence (hesitation of scientists to portray the entire information of their findings out of uncertainty and lack of confidence in the public’s interpretations)

• we have not defeated the environment, rather, we’ve only rendered its system as more unstable and the environment punishes us in return!

environmental humanities

a branch of humanistic inquiry that situates human life within the context of a broader ecosystem

homosociality

social bonding between members of the same gender that may exclude the opposite gender

• power structures that often privilege male relationships and networks

• cultural practices that reinforce same-gender solidarity and hierarchy

cyborg

akin to knights; human flesh coupled to animal, plant, and material technologies

cli-fi’s “unrepresentability problem”

• Adeline Johns-Putra: the climate appears to be difficult to represent

  • Spatial and temporal scale of climate change; hard to reflect in a novel primarily rooted in a human scale (significantly tinier in comparison to the largeness of climate change’s timeline and effects)

• Martin

  • very large numbers involved in change (ex: billions of tons of ice sheets lost every year)

  • immense geographical scale; climate change happens everywhere and all at once

  • extremely long timespans (ex: persistence of carbon dioxide, can last hundreds of years in the atmosphere)

liturgical year

a calendar for collective worship, with specific dates designated as holy days

• mapped sacred time into planetary time, infusing lived experience of the seasons with the sense of the presence of the divine

• marked the passage of time with a rhythmic pattern of religious expectations

  • Michaelmas, All Saint’s Day, Saint John’s Day

nature narratives

stories that formulate Western perceptions of nature (ex: Francis Bacon, femininity, cosmologies)