Kate Rigby

University of Cologne | UOC · Department of English

In this short article, I explore the ways in which literary studies, and in particular, the study of ecopoetry and ecopoetics, can contribute to current engagements with the temporal horizon of ‘deep’, geological, time. Drawing on the concept of ‘temporal discernment’ advanced by environmental philosopher, James Hatley, I argue for the cultivation...

The contributors to Kin draw on the work of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018), a foundational voice in environmental humanities, to examine the relationships of interdependence and obligation between human and nonhuman lives. Through a close engagement over many decades with the Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingara in northern...

https://cloudsofmagellanpress.net/into-your-hands-edited-by-andrew-brown/

Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.

In responding to the spatiotemporally specific geographies of extinction charted in the articles in this special section, this article reflects on the sociocultural factors that inform the ways in which extinction is framed and impede recognition of the enormity of the anthropogenic extinction event in which we are all bound. This article argues th...

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Reclaiming Romanticism rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways...

This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area,...

When considering the prospects for a coming together of zoopoetics and ecopoetics, and, more broadly, environmental humanities and animal studies, there can be few critters better to think with than bees. Bees abound in contemporary poetry, albeit, as Driscoll would insist, in absentia, as marks on a page, legible only within the code of written hu...

This article contributes an Australian perspective to this special issue’s exploration of the parameters of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and its relationship to ecocriticism. Whereas in the US, and to some extent also in the UK, environmental humanities are seen to be closely associated with literary studie...

This article contributes an Australian perspective to this special issue’s exploration of the parameters of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and its relationship to ecocriticism. Whereas in the US, and to some extent also in the UK, environmental humanities are seen to be closely associated with literary studie...

The term écofeminisme is said to have been first coined in 1974 by radical French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne. Identifying the underlying cause for the twin crises of overpopulation and overproduction—somewhat reductively—in the age-old patriarchal domination of women, d’Eaubonne called upon feminists to wed their cause to that of the environment...

In this chapter, I argue that the twofold renovation of the concept of sustainability proposed by Fischer et al. invites a deeper questioning of prevailing cultural assumptions, perceptions and values regarding human identity, aspirations and interrelations with nonhuman others and our earthly environs, and I explore the potential contribution of l...

Within the variegated tapestry of contemporary ecological thought, two strands in particular are pertinent to the historical exploration of German antecedents in this chapter: namely biosemiotics and ecotheology. While the former constitutes an interdisciplinary, transnational, and wholly secular research project, addressed to the multifarious and...

Drawing on contemporary reconceptualizations of materiality as a site of more-than-human mindfulness, meaning, and moral salience, this chapter brings a material ecocritical perspective to bear on the celebration of caverns, mines, and mining in Novalis’s unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. While the German Romantic romance with mining has...

Theodor Storm’s novella Der Schimmelreiter is set in northwestern Germany, a region with a long history of dyke building and coastal flooding. Drawing on insights into material agency, complexity, and the entwinement of materiality and discourse that have emerged from science studies, I read this text as an exploration of distributed agency that ch...

When the Australian Working Group for the Ecological Humanities rst convened at the start of the new millennium at the Australian National University’s Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, it was as a small group of scholars from different disciplines, each of whom had developed their own angle on the contribution of the humanities and so...

The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 22 features a special section on...

Kate Rigby's essay extends Donna Haraway's “respectful curiosity” to undomesticated animal others, epitomized for Rigby by the magpie, a familiar sight and sound in her corner of Australia. Throughout her essay, Rigby urges human attention to the semiosis of the more-than-human world. Ultimately she asks us to ponder how nonhuman animals might be c...

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, r...

'Encountering Australia, Confronting Catastrophe'. These articles are based on papers presented at one of two consecutive conferences on Australia held in Europe during the northern summer of 2014. The European Association for Studies on Australia held a conference at the Monash University Prato Centre, Italy, in September that explored sites of co...

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknow...

Calls for more broad-based, integrated, useful knowledge now abound in the world of global environmental change science. They evidence many scientists' desire to help humanity confront the momentous biophysical implications of its own actions. But they also reveal a limited conception of social science and virtually ignore the humanities. They ther...

This article examines the relevance of romanticism to ecocriticism. It analyzes some cases of contradictory trends and tendencies that can be traced in the thought and literature of the romantic period and considers some of the ways in which romanticism was taken up in the “new world.” It explores romantic conception of Nature and Freedom and the c...

This chapter turns to questions of ecology and argues that it is only by acknowledging the impossibility of art or literature to adequately represent the “things” around us that one can hope to unsettle the spirit-matter dualism complicit in an historical legacy of ecocide. It explores the Wordsworthian line, “Come forth into the light of things,”...

The Workshop on Valuing Adaptation took place on 11-12 December 2012 with funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF). The workshop explored how personal values, and the process of comparing the value of different outcomes, influence how decisions on climate change adaptation are made.

Special Issue editors, Professor Kate Rigby and Associate Professor Linda Williams, introduce papers arising from the 5th Biennial conference, ‘Regarding the Earth: Ecological Vision in Word and Vision'. Participants in this issue were asked to consider the ecological implications of different ways of perceiving, imagining, valuing and representing...

Eine globale Vernetzung ist für die Profilierung einer wissenschaftlichen Disziplin wie der Germanistik unerlässlich – insbesondere in einem Land wie Australien, aus dessen geostrategischer Lage sich die Selbstverständlichkeit einer starken germanistischen Forschung nicht in gleicher Weise ergibt wie etwa im europäischen Raum. Diesem Erfordernis so...

One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and...

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment is an authoritative guide to the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism. The collection traces the development of ecocriticism from its origins in European pastoral literature and offers fifteen rigorous but accessible essays on the present state of environm...

Der Blick in fremde Küchen und Töpfe ermöglicht es, sich einer Kultur zu nähern - Essen und Kochen sind für die interkulturelle Verständigung zentral. Vor allem literarische Texte geben Einblick in facettenreiche Dimensionen der Gastrosophie, etwa in Tischsitten, Riten, Nahrungstabus, gedächtnis- und erinnerungsfördernde Prozesse sowie Akkulturatio...

How individuals, communities and societies respond to environmental catastrophe, whether in the event or as a potentiality, is crucially informed by the culturally mediated interpretative frameworks within which such disasters are perceived. In this regard, the challenge of confronting ecocrisis is as much hermeneutic and discursive as it is scient...

A suggestion that environmental catastrophe is a present irrefutable occurrence due to global warming is presented. It is suggested that man has to consider climate change seriously and devise ways to save himself and all other forms of life as in the biblical Noah's Ark.

This chapter considers one particular locus in the archaeology of constructivism found in the work of a writer and amateur scientist whose complex contribution to the emergence of modern ecological thought is only now beginning to be more widely appreciated: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Starting with his extraordinary recasting of the figure of Prom...

It is now over twenty years since Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy declared their generation of French critical theorists (not without a trace of thoroughly romantic irony) the inheritors of the avant-garde project of German romanticism: “The Athenaum”, they wrote in The Literary Absolute, “is our birthplace” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 8...

http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2006/09/01/writing-after-nature/

https://arena.org.au/edition/arena-journal-no-25-26/

Although the British romantic poets—notably, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron—have been the subjects of previous ecocritical examinations, Kate Rigby’s Topographies of the Sacred is the first book to compare English and German literary models of romanticism. Rigby treats not only canonical British romantics but an array of major figures in Continental...

An introduction to ecocritical literary and cultural studies.

https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/SSR/article/view/12116 Earlier this year I walked for the first time in a myrtle beech forest, not far from Powelltown in Victoria, once the site of Australia's largest timber processing plant. It was quite late in the afternoon when we arrived there. Lambent late summer sunlight shimmered in the delicate...