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The Call of the Wind. Wild Visits and Dark Atmospheres in Poems by Poe and Dickinson

Imagine this: A dark and desolate December night. Outside, an icy storm is raging. The fading embers of a long burnt down fire provide no comfort and instead only project distorted and wreathing shadows onto the cold floor. A tired man is sitting at his desk, pouring over old, moth-eaten volumes of long forgotten wisdoms. His only company is the yawning darkness beyond the windows and the person-shaped void next to him. It is quiet except for the disconcerting rustling of the curtains and the frozen rain beating against the windowpanes. Then, suddenly, he sits up straight: someone is tapping against his door.

Now, imagine this: a woman is sitting alone at her desk with only a book of poetry to keep her company. Through the open window, a golden sunbeam warms her left knee. No sounds disturb her peaceful perusing of the lines, only the wind murmurs quietly as he passes through the grass in her colourful garden. The birds are chirping merrily, a bright melody accompanying the wind’s calming chant. The bumblebees’ content humming completes the little concert. The woman turns a page; her mind filled with beautiful words about beautiful things. When it knocks politely at her door, she smiles.

Though structurally similar – a person sitting alone at their desk hearing a knock – these two scenes could not appear more different. It takes just a few tweaks and one scenario suddenly feels dark, cold and lonely, whereas the other feels peaceful and quiet. Tweaks to what is usually referred to as a text’s atmosphere; a term that appears to be very straightforward on first glance. But of course, for a literary scholar like me, the easier the answer, the more questions I have. For example: Which narrative and/or poetic factors constitute and contribute to the atmosphere of a literary text? Is it a subjective phenomenon or can there be a poetics of atmospheres? Is the literary atmosphere in any way related to the physical atmosphere? How can we, within the context of literature studies, talk about it in a productive way? And, most importantly, what does “atmosphere” even mean?

Atmospheric Relations

Depending on whom you ask, the term can imply a wide range of different things: a climate scientist may tell you that it refers to the accumulation of gases surrounding our planet, whereas a psychologist might say that it refers to a certain type of mood that is prevalent in a room. Natalie Dederichs, in an attempt to combine these different concepts, defines the atmospheric in her book Atmosfears. The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction (2023) as “the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13). Atmospheres, therefore, are not only invisible, indescribable phenomena of the “in between” of individuals and their environment (cf. Gernot Böhme), but rely on and are constructed by the interaction and the distribution of agency between them. Anthropocentric, narrow conceptions of the term are thus no longer productive. When it comes to defining what it means to be an “affective and relational being in the world” (22), Dederichs further suggests that literary analysis can lend a hand to ecocriticism. After all, what better way to look at the immersive dynamic resulting from the friction between material reality and the individual than “where the interrelatedness of matter and text, reader and world(s) plays such an important role in the aesthetic experience?” (15) She further points out that, especially within the context of ecocriticism, literary atmospheres are uniquely equipped to enable “an embodied understanding of climate change because it is through atmospheric encounters that we are drawn into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20).


“The Raven,” by E. H. Wehnert, illustrating the poem by Poe (1856) via WikiCommons

But what, we may ask now, even are “atmospheric encounters”? After all, human beings always exist within and are dependent on (physical) atmospheres. Can we even distinguish between commonplace breathing and an “atmospheric encounter”? And which criteria can we employ to determine the difference?  These questions lead us right back to the scenes with which I began this essay. The first “atmospheric encounter” occurs in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”(1844) where, as the title suggests, a raven (a representative of the ‘outside environment’) plays a key role. Because the bird can speak, it allows us to explore the (uncanny) dynamics between human and non-human agencies. The second example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Wind’s Visit” (approx. 1863), introduces similar dynamics, although the visitor (a gust of wind) is neither really tangible nor visible and thus more of an “imaginary presence” (Dederichs, 14).

Conditions of an “Atmospheric Encounter”

The scenic openings above reflect the outsets of “The Raven ” and “The Wind’s Visit ” (in that order). Both start with the poem’s speaker sitting alone in their house, when they suddenly hear a knocking. Both assume that it must either be “a visiter [sic]” (l. 16, Poe) or “a guest” (l. 5, Dickinson). The different connotations of each term (a “guest” is usually someone familiar who is encouraged to linger, whereas mention of a “visitor” implies formality and passing) foreshadow the later events of each poem. The tapping which disturbs the speaker of “The Raven” in his exhaustion-induced sleep is at first hesitant. The speaker describes: “I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, // And so faintly you came tapping, … // That I scarce was sure I heard you” (l. 21ff, Poe). Eventually, it grows more insistent and the “visiter [sic]” knocks several more times and “somewhat louder than before” (l. 23, Poe), until the speaker finally opens the correct window. Through a number of different stylistic devices in the first few stanzas (e. g. repetition, gemination, epiphora, internal rhyme), the plea for entry receives a sense of urgency on a textual level as well. In “The Wind’s Visit”, the visitor knocks politely on the speaker’s door. Again, the (lack of) insistency for requesting admission is reflected on the narrative level, as the onomatopoetic alliteration of the “t”-sound in the opening line (“The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –“ (l. 1, Dickinson)) imitates the slow, rhythmic knock of the visitor asking for entrance.

Both speakers eventually bid their unexpected visitors entrance. The speaker in “The Wind’s Visit” quickly musters up the courage to answer the knocking and “like a Host – ‘Come in’ // I boldly answered” (l. 2f, Dickinson). The speaker in “The Raven” is more hesitant, already unsettled by the raging storm outside. He has to reassure himself several times that “’Tis the wind and nothing more” (l. 36, Poe) making the noise. After the knocking continues, he eventually resolves that, in fact, there must be a physical being outside asking for entrance. The way in which the visitors knock and the speaker’s reactions to it each complement each other: a polite, slow knocking in “The Wind’s Visit” results in a calm, friendly bid for entrance, whereas the increasingly insistent, repeated knocking in “The Raven” causes uneasiness and heightened discomfort in the speaker. Here, the overall mood of the poems not only aids the readers imagination but, again, foreshadows the later events. The speakers’ reactions mirror the fact that an unexpected visitor is much more likely to turn into a guest invited to stay if they turn up at a pleasant hour of the day, instead of in the middle of the night.

The manner of first encountering the visitors, how it relates to their tapping, and the resulting dynamics of agency also differ quite significantly between the poems. The anthropomorphised gust of wind in Dickinson’s poem, for instance, does not require a door to be opened. Still, he waits for the verbal affirmation and invitation of the speaker before he enters. The theme of politeness and restraint is therefore continued, and the speaker controls the situation thus far. The raven, on the other hand, struts in as soon as the speaker opens the window: “Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he” (l. 38f, Poe). Although he does not fly in in a frenzy, he still wastes no time with waiting for an affirmation or welcome. The speaker thus loses his agency over the situation as soon as the window is opened. This comparison shows how the contrast between a welcome guest in “The Wind’s Visit” and an unexpected visitor in “The Raven” is intensified.

Atmospheric Agency – Anxiety or Assuagement?

However, neither poem lets this be the last word in terms of agency. In Dickinson’s poem, the wind’s calm manner of knocking and respectful entrance differ quite strongly from his conduct within the room. Whereas before entering, he is anthropomorphised through comparisons and personifications and has a corporeal presence (he can knock), these features all disappear as soon as he enters: he is a “footless guest” (l. 5, Dickinson) with “No Bone … to bind Him” (l. 9). He returns to being a meteorological phenomenon that cannot be controlled; his movements are described as “[r]apid” (l. 5), “flitting” (l. 17), and “flurriedly” (l. 19). This is also reflected on the textual level: the poem contains a large number of enjambments, and the sentences exclusively end with dashes or no punctuation at all. This creates the reading experience of rushing through the poem. In “The Raven”, the bird also does not behave how one would assume based on its bid for entrance. Although the raven enters “with many a flirt and flutter” (l. 37, Poe), he refrains from rushing about the room like the wind and instead “[p]erched, and sat, and nothing more” (l. 42, Poe) on a marble bust of Pallas Athena. The manner of asking for admission and the visitor’s behaviour within the room thus do not differ only between the poems but also on the intradiegetic level of each individual poem.

Neither the raven nor the wind remain quiet for long. Although the wind cannot articulate actual words, the speaker still refers to his utterances as a form of speaking: “His Speech was like the Push // Of numerous Humming Birds at once” (l. 10f, Dickinson). More than that, “His Fingers, as He passed // Let go a music – as of tunes // Blown tremulous in Glass” (l. 14ff). This passage pertains to the Aeolian wind harp, a popular poetic symbol during the Romanticism period. Named after the Greek wind god Aeolus, it refers to an instrument whose strings are set in motion via directing a gust of air or wind into a resonance space. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary of Literary Symbols, it is also commonly used as a “metaphor of the internal breeze or breath responding to the inspiration of a natural wind” (8) which increasingly “came to represent the experience of creative resonance between mind and environmental forces in the Romantic imagination” (Dederichs, 49). This is also the case in “The Wind’s Visit”: the speaker describes that the wind not only enters their residence but their “Residence within” (l. 4, Dickinson, emphasis added) and leaves its “music” there. The gust of wind consequently does not create music on an actual aeolian harp; it is the speaker who becomes the resonance space for the wind’s natural inspiration.

Aeolian harp in the old castle of Baden Baden – Instrument with strings installed in front of an open window (wikicommons)

In order to look at the wind not only as a metaphor for inspiration (also note the German term “Inspirationshauch”, which literally translates to a “whiff” or “breath” of inspiration) but as an atmospheric phenomenon, let us return to Dederichs, who states that the atmospheric functions as “a particularly fruitful category to theorise the tensions and fuzzy borders between perceiver and perceived, subject and object” (14). Considering the fact that the wind enters the speaker’s “Residence within”, the environmental phenomenon in this poem serves as a good example for the ways in which an atmospheric encounter “shakes concepts of physical presence and destabilises anthropocentric notions of agency” (12). The immersive and, crucially, reciprocal dynamic of encounters with the atmospheric becomes evident through the speaker having to allow the wind inside and the wind in turn evaporating the borders between inside and outside, between individual and environment, and forcing the speaker to surrender control over the interaction. Especially the wind’s invisibility and lack of tangibility thus reflects the misassumption of anthropocentric control over encounters with non-human agents and atmospheric phenomena. Notably, the concession of control over the interaction is not negatively connotated in “The Wind’s Visit” (more on that later).

The cover of the first edition of Poems, publ. 1890

In “The Raven”, the opposite is the case: the tensions resulting from encounters with the atmospheric and loss of agency to a non-human party are decidedly uncanny. Just as the wind, the raven is not a silent visitor. In fact, Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he chose the raven as a visitor precisely because he is “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679). Thus, the tension between human and non-human agency (i.e., between a reasoning and a non-reasoning creature) has been consciously considered and employed by Poe in his poem. It immediately arises as soon as the raven invades the speaker’s space without waiting for him to welcome him inside and thereby assuming agency of the situation. The speaker, still very much preoccupied with grief for his deceased love Lenore, starts a conversation with the raven who, much to his amusement, can only speak one word (“Nevermore”). This allows the speaker to guide the conversation and to reassume control over the interaction. Unfortunately, he quickly begins to ask himself “what this ominous bird of yore … // Meant in croaking ‘Nevermore’” (l. 69ff) and grows more and more perturbed by the bird’s answers to his increasingly distressed questions. For example, the speaker asks whether he will be reunited with his beloved in heaven, whilst being fully aware of the negating answer the raven will give him. Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the speaker “experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected ‘Nevermore’ the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow” (680). This means that although it is the speaker who leads the conversation, he allows the influence of the raven’s answers on his mental state to grow because he wants to feel sad. Once more, the non-human agent from the outside invades not only the speaker’s personal space but also their (state of) mind.

Moreover, the raven is not only “the bird of ill-omen” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679) and a “renowned harbinger of … despair” (Farrant/Urakova, 161), but also a familiar representative of everyday encounters with nature. This makes him a very suitable “baseline from which the uncanny will emerge, the necessary starting point for de-naturing to take place” (Farrant/Urakova, 160) and thus a good vehicle to create “an immersive and yet disruptive experience of otherness” (Dederichs, 20). The atmospheric encounter is not a positively connotated affective-immersive experience like in Dickinson’s poem, but rather an uncanny affective-invasive circumstance.

Remains of an “Atmospheric Encounter”

The theme of dwindling human agency in atmospheric encounters culminates in the poems’ endings. The wind in Dickinson’s poem leaves the speaker as unceremoniously as he came: “He passed … // He visited – still flitting – // … ‘twas flurriedly” (l. 17ff, Dickinson). This is reflected in the poem’s sudden ending as well (“Again, He tapped – … // And I became alone –“ (l. 19f)). As previously established, the gust of wind/inspiration, “[t]o offer whom a Chair // Were as impossible as hand // A Sofa to the Air” (l. 5-8), cannot be controlled or detained and leaves the speaker much as they were in the beginning; almost as if the visit had never occurred. However, the dash at the end of the last line (instead of the grammatically more conventional dot), suggests a certain openness to the encounter that is transferred to the reader:

Readers remain in very much the same situation as that in which Dickinson’s speakers often find themselves: we have received a miraculous visitor … who just as miraculously abandons us in a state of acute susceptibility. None of these poems can be said precisely to end, since they perpetually maintain themselves at the instant and in the condition in which they stopped. (Anderson, 218)

The result of this atmospheric encounter’s dynamic therefore is an open one. The speaker opened themselves up to the visitor’s influence and is rewarded by an immersive-affective, inspirational experience. Although they surrender control over the situation, they do it willingly (“boldly”) and the loss of agency is not marked as uncanny – rather it becomes something at once inspirational and aspirational. Anderson, too, resolves that Dickinson uses the encounter with the atmospheric phenomenon wind as a “synecdoche for transcendent experience” (213) and as allegory for the overlapping of “transcendent life and circumstantial, daily existence” (205).

The speaker in “The Raven” has no such luck. In fact, he experiences the opposite of Dickinson’s speaker’s calm inspiration, as he is increasingly negatively affected by the raven’s answers. As previously mentioned, he initially finds himself amused by his unusual, feathered visitor (cf. l. 43), a fact that is also evident in his use of archaic pronouns to address the raven. However, with his “ease reclining” (l. 75) progressively during their conversation, he eventually grows more and more frenzied and almost hysterical in his desire to get rid of the ebony bird: “Get thee back into the tempest and … // Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door! // Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (l. 98ff) Unfortunately for him, the raven, who understandably has no desire to return to the storm (and also cannot understand him), will not leave. This presents a problem to the speaker, who has come to regard his visitor as a “demon” (l. 105) and “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil” (l. 85). The raven has become “emblematical … of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (Poe, “TPoC”, 684), not only to the poem’s readers but also to the speaker himself. The speaker is torn between the desire to “forget this lost Lenore” (l. 82f) and the pain her memory brings, and to remember her forever (cf. Stanzas 13 & 14). Using Farrant and Urakova’s words to return to the atmospheric dynamic of this encounter: “the raven is an intruder; he comes from outside and eventually ‘masters’ the narrator in his own chamber. Instead of being caged … he entraps the narrator” (162). Although the raven has no harmful intentions, he still possesses all the agency in the situation, simply because the speaker attributes it to him. He is the one who continues to ask questions and the one who decides to feel distressed by the answers. It is the encounter with the atmospheric that leads the speaker down a spiral of grief and hopelessness, until he ultimately resolves that “my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor // Shall be lifted – nevermore!” (l. 107f) Again, the atmospheric agent invading the individual’s space holds agency not because they simply took it but because the subject encountering the atmospheric awarded it to them (although this time, not consciously). Again, the encounter is dynamic and reciprocal instead of one-sided.

The “Atmospheric Encounter”: Brushing or Bruising Experience?

According to Dederichs, the atmospheric “points to the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13) and that which draws us “into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20). This is, as the comparison of Poe’s and Dickinson’s poems has shown, not only a feature of contemporary prose, but also present in lyrical encounters. The dissolution of human agency, which Dederichs emphasizes several times, also seems to be a defining feature not only of physical and (literary) atmospheric encounters, but for the writing of poetry itself as well: To be an individual that enters into a dynamic and/or creative relationship with its surroundings means to surrender at least a certain degree of control over the situation. This can either be a daunting dynamic (cf. “The Raven”) or a calming and rewarding experience (cf. “The Wind’s Visit”), depending on the willingness of the individual to let go of their own preoccupations and the openness they bring to the encounter. Dickinson’s speaker voluntarily surrenders control to the atmospheric phenomenon and is left inspired and with the invisible remnants of a pleasant, ephemeral visit. Poe’s speaker, however, is too preoccupied with his emotions to productively engage with his visitor. The atmospheric encounter is not only a metaphor for his mental state (the knocking and raven are a metaphor for grief as something invasive that cannot be ignored) but also a catalyst for the speaker’s inner turmoil and as a mirror for his feelings. Whereas Dickinson’s speaker remains alone but not lonely, Poe’s speaker is not alone anymore, but lonelier than ever. In one case, the encounter is the beginning of the end, in the other, the end is just the beginning.

            Ultimately, both atmospheric encounters model physical experiences as much as they (re)imagine the effect of writing and composing poetry. To read this not as a mere metaphor but as (metonymical) consequence of dynamic relations with our surroundings reminds us to contemplate our reciprocal affiliations with the atmospheric. It allows us to reflect both on our status as readers, writers, and beings in the world, and to recontextualize ourselves within the complex dynamics of our environment and learn to engage with them in a productive way.

Aive Jürgens is a graduate student at Ruhr-University Bochum (MA Comparative Literature and Anglistik/Amerikanistik). She is particularly interested in questions of narrative unreliability, mythology, and gothic fiction, but always happy to explore new topics.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Dickinson, Emily. “The Wind – tapped like a tired Man – (152a).” Poems 1891: Packet XXVIII, Fascicle 29. Houghton Library/Harvard University, ca. 1862, pp. 150f, https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12175331. Accessed: May 07 2025.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, and Context Criticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, Norton, 2004, pp. 58-61.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, and Context Criticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, Norton, 2004, pp. 675-684.

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Anderson, Douglas. “Presence and Place in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” The New England Quarterly vol. 57, no. 2, 1984, pp. 205-24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/364993. Accessed: May 07 2025.

Dederichs, Natalie. Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction, edited by Moritz Ingwersen, Solvejg Nitzke et al., Transcript, 2023 (= Critical Futures 2).

Farrant, Timothy, and Alexandra Urakova. “From ‘The Raven’ to ‘Le Cygne’: Birds, Transcendence, and the Uncanny in Poe and Baudelaire.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 156-74, https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.15.2.0156. Accessed: May 15 2025.

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Are Trees Even Real? On the Politics of „Arboreality“

Trees have many remarkable qualities; they grow fruit and wood, exude the oxygen we breathe, provide shade, all the things. Yet, one of the most intriguing arboreal abilities is rarely mentioned: they are able to disappear. I am not talking about trees being cut down, burnt or otherwise being destroyed or dying materially. I am referring to trees – and, as it happens, with them whole ecosystems – disappearing from discourse, while, at the same time, doing all the amazing things trees do. But even though this arboreal disappearing act does not consist of literal plants withering away (a very real problem!), it is also not wholly metaphorical. To wonder whether or not trees are even real is not my attempt at dabbling in philosophy either. Rather, the question has been bugging me because while I was thinking about trees as aesthetic-material phenomena, as ghost trees and tree futures full-time (i.e. writing my book “Fremde Verwandtschaft”), I fear, trees have fallen of everyone’s radar once more.

I noticed the absence, when listening to the radio. The moderator introduced a top three of nonfiction books. Two of the books were dealing with important things – one with migration and Heimat, the other with the question of morals in current political discourse – but the top book of the list was introduced as “something that is not political, but deals with animals”. The book in question was Susana Monsó’s Playing Possum. How Animals Understand Death (2024) in its recent German translation Das Schweigen der Schimpansen (transl. by Thomas Brovot, Suhrkamp 2025). This is not a book about trees, but where a book about grieving animals counts as unpolitical, I don’t even want to know what role plants would play. I am tempted to find out, how many plant (let alone) tree books make it on such lists…for the moment, the dismissal of Monsó’s book as ‘not political’ is enough for me. Not just because I am disappointed that something that at least touches upon my work (i.e. how the relationship between human and non-human actors is understood) is pushed into a realm that, though interesting, has not much to do with our present reality. But also because this pushing aside of human-nonhuman relationships out of the realm of pressing political issues has a lot to do with precisely that reality.

Once again, it seems “a conversation about trees is almost a crime/ because entails a silence about so many misdeeds”. Sure, my head would go to Brecht, when debating how to feel about the speed with which “ecological topics” are pushed to the background when human “misdeeds” come to the fore. And really, aren’t there more important things at the moment than talking about trees (trees, here, being a pars pro toto for all more-than-human matters)? Yes, of course, there are more important things, however, not because they are inherently more important, but because there are so many things and beings that are also important and under threat. So, I am not arguing for talking less about the destruction of human lives in wars, the rise of authoritarianism, the deportation of people who should be welcomed and the discrimination of people who demand nothing more that space and language to express who they are. In short, the global attacks on human rights concern me as much as anyone else. As I argued in a blog post on Bertolt Brecht’s and Adrianne Rich’s “what times are these”-poems, this is not a question of competition per se – looking to trees does not turn you away from human matters permanently. Rather, how we (don’t) talk about trees is part of the cultural poetics in which care and carelessness for other beings (human and more-than-human) unfold.

The ”we”-pronoun I am using is treacherous, precisely because “we” is one of the pronouns that pretends to not ask anything of anyone. It pretends that you and I know whether we are part of the same we or not, I could even suggest and then deny that you are part of my “we”. In relation to trees, “we” is even more treacherous, because the syntactical relation to trees suggests an opposition between “us” humans and an arboreal other. But this beloved Enlightenment universalism has always served exclusionary purposes. Who can lay claim to participation in that idea of “humanity” is and always has been contested. Trees often serve to bridge that gap between nature and culture, body and spirit, because they seem to lend themselves to an easy “we”. Again, this “we” is perfidious, because it pulls a veil over the direction in which this inclusion operates. Those who use it to include trees, often include themselves into an arboreal world rather than the other way around. That is, thinking “we” with trees often equals a fantastic trip into a world that is only “ours”, if “we” wish to. Like the unpolitical, yet grieving chimpanzees whom I heard about on the radio, its humans graciously entering a foreign world that must be ‘interesting’ or ‘teaching us something about ourselves’ to deserve the honor of our precious attention. If I sound polemical, that’s because I am sick of this posture. Being interested in “nature” as a gesture of goodwill, if it is not outright extractivist (we need to know the plants, there might be medicine in them), delegates ecological awareness and activity (dare I say activism) to the realm of hobby and art and as seriously as I take both art and hobbies, this is a dangerous habit. Nevertheless, this habit is ingrained in the concept of ‘nature’ and, as I want to argue, in the concept of ‘tree’. The difficulty is that we need both, even though they do (almost) as much harm as they do good.

Habits: Arboreality and Arborescence

There is a lot of research on the value of ‘nature’ or lack thereof. In 2007, ecocritic Timothy Morton calls for Ecology without Nature in their eponymous book, claiming that the fundamentally romantic idea of Nature (capital N) stands between actual humans and actual nonhumans hindering instead of facilitating direct encounters by putting too many words and images between the two (producing nothing but “Ecomimesis”, Morton’s polemical version of nature writing, and no actual knowledge of or about nature). A little more than ten years later, in his book The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (2018) historian Andreas Malm, equally polemical, dismisses the doing away with “Nature” (=the concept) in favor of a return to nature as a concept that allows for the distance between material and conceptual phenomena to lessen. What both seem to agree on is the notion that ’nature’ is a concept that allows for the representation of a bunch of more-than-human beings and things in order to make it into an opposite (or even opponent) And these are only two examples of thinking about the difficulty to reconcile the aesthetic with the material aspects of nature and it does not become easier when discussions about art and science, fact and fiction enter the picture (as if they were such easy opposites).

Tree forms (round, spreding, pyramidal, oval, conical, vase, columnar, open, weeping, irregular, palm) as per the Northern Sydney Tree Planting guide (here)

“Tree” seems like a less problematic concept, but in fact, it does similar work as nature. I often find “tree” mentioned as one of the concrete or material things that the abstract, immaterial concept “Nature” realizes itself in. But even though “tree” might conjure up images in many people that have a lot in common, it is itself an abstraction or, rather, a habit. That is, there are no trees, only plants that have developed a tree-habit – a woody trunk growing both tall and wide that supports a crown high above the ground in which branches stretch out in order to secure light for the plants leaves. As a literary scholar interested in arboreal agency (in literary texts and beyond), I am inclined to deliberately misunderstand what habit means, in this context. Yet, in the botanical sense it refers to a specific form of growth, not the zoological types of behavior and certainly not the sociological habits and habitus I am inclined to think of. The tree habit is a form that has proven to be useful for plants all over the world and throughout the history of plants:

“The tree habit has evolved independently in a wide range of plants. Given this wide range, it is not surprising that the only common feature of trees is having a perennial woody skeleton. […] This is a superb example of ›convergent evolution‹ where a number of unrelated types of plant have evolved the same answer – height – to the same problem: how to get a good supply of light” (Thomas 2020, 3–4).

Thus, trees are not plants, but forms certain plants can assume under the right conditions. My favorite example is common hazel, a plant which I encounter most often as a shrub, but that can also grow into a tree [Think of the hazel tree in one of its most famed versions in the Grimm fairytale Cinderella]. When we talk about trees or, in fact, when we talk about flowers, shrubs, grains or, perhaps most problematically, weeds, we use categories to lump together plants by means of one of their qualities (growth-habit, propagation form, or, in the case of “weeds” their use to us – read Richard Mabey!!). That is not a problem per se, yet, it suggests concreteness, where we actually use just another category instead of actually talking about a specific plant. You will notice that this is also an opportunity to signify intimacy, to distinguish oneself, – for example, knowing which flowers to chose as a gift can help sending the right ‘message’ [most of us are still familiar with roses signalling love, but the language of flowers is in fact so complex that it needs experts like my colleague Isabel Kranz to decipher it, see book] and the question what your favorite tree might be can be daunting both for people who know many trees and those for whom one looks like the other. The latter case is especially interesting to me, because there will be few people who could not point out a giant woody plant and call it “tree”, but the ability to identify and name specific species differs widely. While I do not subscribe to the idea that it is necessary to learn by heart the species names of all the plants in a specific place to ‘really’ encounter nature, I wonder whether to remain on terms of abstract categories produces difference. Not because you know more about an oak tree, if you know that its species name is Quercus robur but because to know that what you see is an oak tree, you need to pay enough attention to recognize the shape of leaves, bark texture or fruit. Looking closer can even tell you something about individual habits. I have come to appreciate the variety of oak-ish form from almost curly branches and lanky build to gnarly stunted oaks, some I think of as funny, some as earnest – not botanical categories at all but one’s that express familiarity and attention in a way that realizes the abstraction of “tree” not only into (species) names but into attentiveness to specific form. I am reluctant to claim that a tree that I have come to know as a ‘funny dancing oak’ is somehow more real that the concept tree, because I fear that essentializes my very specific habit (this time the behavior) of stopping in my track to look at a plant and allowing me to think of myself as somehow better at recognizing reality. I don’t think this is true or in any way helpful, but the feeling remains, that there are more trees – in the form of material plants – in the world that I inhabit, than in non-tree-people’s worlds. (See what I did there, there’s a new, subtle “we”: tree-people like me; feel invited to be part of it, you made it this far, that counts!!).

Artist Katie Holten plays with this idea, when she uses simplified tree shapes as letters in her font (“Trees”). If you are not very familiar with tree forms (or acquaint yourself with these letters), you will not be able to read a text set in “Trees”. (see Holten The Language of Trees (2023) and Nitzke Making Kin with Trees (2025).

Arboreal discourse intensifies the observation that “tree” is an abstraction because the tradition of using treeness or aspects of it to signify entirely non-vegetal things has turned trees into signs so thoroughly that it sometimes needs reminding that the word actually refers to plants. While the simplified tree-symbol in a book for toddler’s or the sophisticated tree-alphabets of Katie Holten (see image above) signify actual plants, the graph (=tree) that allows to order genealogy, decision paths and all kinds of hierarchical or binary (=branching) information, has taken only one aspect of treeness, that is branching, in order to perform thoroughly human tasks. Arborescence, hence, refers more often to mathematical (e.g. graph theory) than to vegetal worlds. (Arborescence is an even more irresistible invitation to people inclined to purposefully and creatively misuse such terms – such a beautiful word!) I am, of course, not the first to make that observation. Two very prominent forbears are Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze proposed to think in terms of rhizomes instead of roots and to get rid of “the tree book” in order to undermine traditional hierarchical thinking in favor of a wilder, more complex and vegetal thinking. As poet and essayist Sumana Roy has pointed out, that kind of opposition only works if you think of trees only as a graph not as a plant (see How I became a Tree, 2017). That is, the opposition of the real, vegetal rhizome (underscored by an illustration from a lexicon) and the tree that cannot be real for their argument to work. The question whether or not this specific text is interested in trees at all must be relegated to another text, but suffice it to say, even at a quick glance this text increases my suspicions that trees are not real. That does not mean, however, that there are no real trees.

Even without playing around with the term, regarding ‘treeness’ as a habit rather than an ontological state of being, changes what it means to think about trees. A “tree” might not be a real thing but it can be more than a categorization, it can be a means to bring humans and tree into the same reality, a way to relate. Trees are not the realizations of Nature’s abstractions, they are not real things but, if the word refers to plants, are an abstraction that allows thinking very different plants (think oak vs. baobab) together with purpose. This purpose is the point. Environmental historian Jared Farmer puts it like this:

TREES ARE PLANTS THAT PEOPLE CALL TREES—A TERM OF DIGNITY, NOT botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness. A tree is a radically nonhuman thing, a modular organism, that humans exalt through misunderstanding as a person-like being: an individual with torso and limbs.

Jared Farmer: Elderflora. A Modern History of Ancient Trees, 2022, 3.

By declaring plants with a specific habit (woody growth) to belong to a specific type of plant different from all others by virtue of a form that is reminiscent of how humans like to see themselves, i.e. “trees”, humans include them in a “we”. A tree, then, is a misunderstood or a creatively misinterpreted plant. This misunderstanding/misinterpretation allows for a vegetal-human relationship that otherwise seems unthinkable for “us” (=humans). It also allows, and this is what Farmer shows, to differentiate further among trees. Some are not “just” trees, but bear names or are imbued with story, special conservation status and other anthropomorphic ‘honors’. By singling out some trees – declaring them ‘individual’ trees – it becomes plausible to exclude the vast number of trees that are not set apart and cared-for: “In the shadow of the sanctified tree lurks an oppositional archetype, the tree violator” (11). “Tree” (the concept) is, in this understanding, a device that is far from ‘realizing’ abstract nature into concrete beings. Instead, as a device, “tree” is an offer of relationship that can result in an individual plant becoming more real (as a singular tree, with a species and individual name for example) or in a dissolution of plants in the plural “trees” turned into a collective singular like timber or an anonymous process such as “deforestation”. In both cases tree’s existence is precarious at best, because the tree depends on its position as a focal point of human attention and either becomes something that it is not (a “person-like being” instead of a “radically nonhuman thing”, Farmer) or vanishes into the mass noun “resource”. I am aware that I am at risk of moving my question into the realm of pop-philosophical thought experiments like the famous “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” [Gotta love Wikipedia for having an entry on this! ], what I am really interested in is whether and how there is a way to talk about trees (politically) without either anthropomorphizing them or regarding them as ‘soulless’ matter [Vegetal soul is a huge topic for critical plant studies, and I might get to it at another point in time. Philosopher Michael Marder has (re-)introduced the term and the questions that it raises in Plant Thinking (2013).] In my practical life, I do both, of course, but I wouldn’t be a literary and cultural scholar if I didn’t have a text in mind, that might offer answers to my questions.

Living with trees as if they were plants

One of the reasons I am newly attuned to “conversations about trees” is Rebecca Campbell’s novella Arboreality which was first published in 2022 and came to my attention because it was recently translated into German by Barbara Slawig (Carcosa Verlag). I have been increasingly critical of (anti-)deforestation novels (especially it’s most famous exemplar, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, 2018), for offering, in my opinion, easy outs that will not reach beyond the page. Plant and animal studies scholar Susan McHugh has written a brilliant chapter comparing “big tree novels” in the context of expectations of literature’s power to transform reader’s awareness and skepticism towards “fiction” in non-fiction and pop-science writing (see McHugh 2025). She shows, that the opposition of fact and fiction, wherein fiction only has a role to play, when it comes to convincing audiences of the facts that scientists painstakingly gathered, is false because it is literally too short-sighted for the duration of arboreal and sylvan life and human-arboreal interactions:

Read together, The Overstory and Barkskins make a powerful case that plant science is only part of what is needed for forest conservation and restoration. Centuries of human cross-generational stories of colonization are caught up in the tens-of-millennia evolutionary histories of forest plants and other creatures, implicated in the dramas of nurturing and threatening on which our shared futures depend.

Susan McHugh, “From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking”, 2025, 120.

Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality differs in many ways from the big tree novels that have had considerable success in the past ten years. First of all, it is not a big novel, and second of all, it is, I would argue, not a tree novel. Rather, I read Arboreality as an attempt to live with and in relation to plants, potentially giant woody plants, without mistaking them for humans. What it has in common with the big tree novels, however, is a commitment to arboreal poetics, that is, the attempt to engage formally with arboreal habits. Powers’ The Overstory uses tree-parts roots, trunk, crown and seed as structuring elements of the novel (the most common type of arboreal poetics), whereas Annie Proulx models the temporal pace and scope of her novel Barkskins after Pinus strobus, the white pine, narrating slowly and detailed through four centuries of deforestation history in North America; which makes for sometimes excruciating reading, if your attention span, like mine, resembles a squirrel more than a tree, but it is absolutely worth it. Arboreality, taking seriously its title, takes up those strategies – the stories encompass roughly a hundred years, it pays great attention to very specific qualities of arboreal life and it narrates at a slow pace – its arboreal poetics focus on the connectivity of trees rather than their visible form. “Visible” meaning, here, what humans can see of trees. Instead of depending on the contested if intriguing vision of the wood wide web [the web of tree roots and mychorrizal fungi in the forest floor whose properties are highly debated, see here] and imaginations of arboreal-fungal communication and what it would be like if humans could listen in, Campbell’s book looks both at “tree” as a concept of relation and at the actual plants that might refer to in relation to human beings. That is, both the stories that are told and the forms they are told in take their cue from trees and grow into one another, refusing the individuality and closedness that human categories otherwise suggest. One way this (not necessarily intentional) strategy realizes itself is in the relative brevity of the text and the difficulty of pinning down a genre. The German version seems to have more trouble with it, calling it both “Erzählungen” (stories) and “Mosaikroman” (mosaic novel), possibly because Novelle/novella is a very specific thing in German literary history. Either way, the chapters of the book are both parts of a larger whole and individual stories, which I read as modular storytelling, much in the vein of the modular organization of plants. That is, you can read Arboreality as a consecutive text or read any of the chapters separately and still get an impression of what it does. I deliberately avoid talking of “the whole”, because the text does not form a whole. Rather, its modules/stories shed light on aspects of a world or reality that has lost its claim to wholeness and, thus, becomes more arborealistic, if you will.

Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (link)

The stories revolve around humans living in a warmer world (located in the Pacific West of North America) stretching from scenarios that are not far off from our own present to around the year 2100 (a pivotal year in climate scenarios). My favorite story might be the first one, “Special collections”, following a scholar who collaborates with a librarian to save some of a university library in an act of near-futuristic canonization. In the foreseeable future, the library will be flooded but apparently books and library services are on no official agenda, so the DIY distribution of knowledge and keeping of books follows a very pragmatic logic:

We’re going to need books again, for a while at least. Maybe forever, but we can’t if they’re all turned into mush and locked away on campus.
“What do we save? Beyond Pope, obviously.”
“Pope. And animal husbandry. Geography. Geology. How to extract teeth. How to run a homestead.” This time she laughed. “A homestead.”

Rebecca Campbell: Arboreality, 7.

Yet, making the protagonist an academic ensures that pragmatism doesn’t take over and some appreciation for books and what they are about seeps into consideration. Both romanticism and pragmatism entwine themselves in the decision to save a book that, you might guess it, will take on a life of its own in the course of Arboreality:

He wondered what he had denied the future:  Some fact they would need in twenty years: how to mend a photovoltaic plate, or set a leg or cure croup or make a smoker. He was tired, cold in the damp sunless hall, but on this day in January, several years after he and Berenice had begun dismantling the collection, he stopped in at SB469-476.4. Landscape architecture. From the shelf, he pulled a book full of diagrams and photographs of trees: coppicing and inosculation, pleached Italian hedges and espaliered peaches in a Provençal gardens, tanzlinden in German villages and baubotanik towers in Denmark. The living root bridges of Meghalaya. Bleachers of rubber fig roots, from which young men craned their necks to watch cricket matches. Furniture not made of wood, but grown from the branches of living trees. He could imagine, suddenly, a future world in which these were ordinary, lives lived in the branches and among the leaves. The book was too heavy — as Berenice had put it — to carry with you if you were fleeing a plague or a flood. But nevertheless he packed it in a box bound for a friend in the Cowichan Valley, who had volunteered a whole room to the cause.

Rebecca Campbell: Arboreality, 11-12.

The book will inspire someone to collaborate with (as of yet) fictional trees – Aurum, a species reminiscent of quaking aspen, that forms colonies and can be brought to grow into shapes that adhere less to arboreal habit than to human buildings. Yet, what I admire about Arboreality is the attention to both sides of book- and tree-love and care. There is an atrocious act of tree violation in the center of the book, whose purpose and effect, however, is music so beautiful that it brings a human-arboreal community together and motivates life in the ruins of “our” civilization. The last old growth Sitka spruce, sacrificed for a perfect violin; one ethical conundrum of many in a world in which resources are not invisible because nobody needs to consider them, but because they are simply gone. Arboreality is not a novel of hope that shows people how to save anything (let alone forests, civilization or planets). It is a novel about stubborn acts – very explicitly drawn with the colors of counterculture environmentalism – of hope and even enjoyment in the face of scarcity and destruction. The care with which someone tries to learn about plant medicine and, when she cannot save her partner, tries to make a birthday dinner (Nachos and Funfetti cake) from the few supplies that are available to her; the care with which someone plants ‘weeds’ into the front and back yards of abandoned houses where there were only lawns and the care with which someone coaxes woody plants to change their habit into a symbol of arboreality, that is not treeness, but what Jared Farmer calls “treehood”. All these stories of care are connected by the question of what is possible and how if human life happens in a world where trees are not only real but determine whether or not the world is livable (spoiler alert: it turns out that is always already the world we live in). After “the fiery decades” a slow regrowth both of human settlements and forests becomes barely palpable and the way in which Campbell does not offer explanations of how to live but rather lets her stories explore possibilities of congregation (in a Cathedral Arboreal no less) with trees as an alternative to treeness. Arboreality, as both the reality of trees in the sense that they are real and that our reality is arboreal, shifts the question from likeness to congregation, from anthropomorphization vs. objectification, from treeness to treehood. “Treehood is as multitudinous as treeness is reductive” according to Jared Farmer, and, I want to add, this is where the politics of arboreality really come into play. Not as a narrative or imperative of salvation (save the trees!) but as a challenge to become less human, more arboreal; to include the un-real and abstract, the fictional and imaginary into ‘our’ lived reality. Arboreality hints at the different conditions, privileges and freedoms required for such a call. As Susan McHugh points out, the risks of the currently dominating lifestyles are unequally distributed to the detriment of Indigenous, marginalized and nonhuman communities. Campbell (fortunately) does not suggest, that the impending slow catastrophes of climate collapse will put everyone on equal footing, it is a pessimistic novel in that respect. But that is actually what makes its version of arboreality so plausible. To live in a world in which trees are real and reality is arboreal is, above all, tedious. Like care, it is not realized in grand philosophical or theoretical gestures but in showing up every day. Arboreality and the human place within it depend on practices of care. Relegating more-than-human and human ‘others’ to the background of ‘interesting entertainment’ denies their reality and exposes our lifestyle as a phantasm. I couldn’t imagine a more ‘political’ insight.

Campbell, Rebecca. Arboreality. Stelliform Press 2022.

Farmer, Jared. Elderflora. A Modern History of Ancient Trees, Picador 2022.

Holten, Katie. The Language of Trees: How Trees Make Our World, Change Our Mind and Rewild Our Lives. Elliott & Thompson 2023.

Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press 2013.

McHugh, Susan. 2025. From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. In Plant Poetics. ed. by Jacobs, Joela, Isabel Kranz, und Solvejg Nitzke, Critical plant studies 10. Brill 2025, 102-122.

Nitzke, Solvejg. Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care. Palgrave 2025.

Roy, Sumana. 2017. How I Became a Tree. New Delhi: Aleph.

Thomas, Peter A.. Trees. Their Natural History. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press 2020.

Sensing, Questioning, Reflecting – Meaning-making in/through Multimodal Ecologies

Guest post by Kirsten Jüdt

It is my pleasure to welcome guest author Kirsten Jüdt. Kirsten is a doctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary project “Disrupt!Research. Dynamic Collaboration under the Conditions of Disruption” at TU Dresden, where she investigates “Contact Scenes” between humans and non-humans, scientists and non-scientists, knowledge-seekers and their ‘objects’ (together with Svenja Engelmann-Kewitz, Jakob Hammerschmidt and me).

I first came across Hanna Tuulikki’s Air falbh leis na h-eòin | Away with the Birds by accident in 2017. In the final phase of my M.A.-studies, I was doing research for my thesis on intermediality and ecological communication. Having a background in comparative literature, my interest always went beyond what we generally perceive as a (literary) text. I was interested in the synergy of different media (film, photography, literary text) to negotiate human-nature-relationships, an interest that reaches beyond an examination of nature and literary text because to me, ecological thinking means to see the arts as and in the environment of social, cultural and political spheres.

Watching Tuulikki’s performance (view the full piece here) for the first time was equally alienating and intriguing: You hear a complex web of non-lexical sounds mimicking bird calls woven together with rhythmic cyclical phrases like hion-dail-a-la-horo-hi-ho-uuuuuuu (movement 2), or pil-il-iu (movement 3) invoking the waves of the sea on the shoreline and the different seabirds in their habitats. Being immersed in this soundscape, I felt like being taken out of my conscious and into the present moment, experiencing my senses as such. These strange voices seemed to carry their own and my humanness to a space ‘in between’ sea and land, immersed in the elements. I felt like I was part of what happened in Tuulikki’s performance, being connected to birds, humans and landscape and couldn’t help but be amazed at the human voice taking on more-than-human qualities asking Can I sing bird or water or landscape?

But while the soundscape took me out of my analytical mindset – a welcome diversion from my usual approach to research objects – it was the editing of the video that caught my eye. You see the Isle of Canna (the original site of the performance), its mountains and water lines, rocks, the sea, flying birds, the audience arriving by ferry and the performers in their oyster-catcher costumes on the shoreline. Dissolving black and white footage of the landscape alternates with the coloured footage of the performers, digital reproductions of a film tear and an overexposure at the end – a bird flying into the sun. These disruptions distanced me from what I was experiencing and brought my attention to the distinction between what was shown (the content) and how it was presented (the form), I became aware I was also immersed in a piece of art.

I knew I was watching a performance, that the voice played a crucial role, that the costumes of the performers suggested a metamorphosis from human to bird, but looking at each of the components alone did not provide an access to what ‘it’ was that I was trying to interact with and extract meaning from. I only had gotten hints at the fact that something was communicated beyond words – by imitation, vocalization and gesture; by integrating body, environment and different media. At first, I thought this was only of interest for performance and theatre studies and too far-fetched for an ecocritical thesis that dealt with literary texts and photo-text relations. I had no idea how to include it in my M.A.-thesis (so I didn’t) but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it. Tuulikki disrupted my expectations in a way that left me questioning how ecologies and media interact, how art produces ecologies and disrupts them at the same time and, not least, what the “nature” of these disruption is. 

How to get from Ecocriticism to multimodal ecologies? 

So, why not pursue this in a PhD-thesis? While Tuulikki’s interest in ecologies and the more-than-human finds expression in alternative approaches to making kin at the intersection of visual arts, contemporary music and contemporary performance, I wondered if there was a connection to genuine fields of literary studies. In fact, Tuulikki draws on Scottish-Gaelic folk tales, songs and poetry that imitate birdsong and depict a close relationship to the landscape. Yet, approaching Tuulikki’s work through an examination of intertextual relations, i.e. ways of constructing meaning through other (preceding) texts still wouldn’t do the whole project justice – yes, literature was one part of it, but I also found that Tuulikki’s performance itself was part of a larger collection of material. 

Screenshot “Away with the Birds” Hanna Tuulikki

Air falbh leis na h-eòin | Away with the Birds is a composition written for ten vocalists and comprises five movements exploring the mimesis of birds in Scottish-Gaelic songs, yet besides the original on-site performance on the Isle of Canna (Inner Hebrides, Scotland) and the 50-minute film I watched, the project also entails a website that functions as a digital interactive reinterpretation of the performance, a map of Canna drawn by Tuulikki herself, a podcast, interviews and other material documenting the collaborative artistic process. The website (fully accessible when I first visited – unfortunately, some of the material has disappeared since then) contains a multitude of content, for example a visualisation of the score in the form of  concrete poetry, drawings of seabirds, archival material of the folksongs, field-recordings of the birds that are imitated in the score, the song lyrics and poems used in the score and extensive audio-commentaries about each movement. Tuulikki here offers a rich experience of the artwork in a broader (cultural) context that goes beyond the parameters of performance and exhibition.

Thus, I discovered more layers of meaning, in fact, most of what I thought to be non-lexical words or mere sound was actually part of the Scottish song tradition, i.e. keening and waulking songs women sang at work, or had its roots in Scottish poetry. In this way, Away with the Birds invites its viewers and listeners to become navigators to explore the panorama of the shore and cliffs, i.e. the specific characteristics of the landscape the performance is located in, learn to hear the hubbub of the birds as a musical chorus and eventually unearth what Tuulikki calls ‘mnemonic topographies’, “the land encoded in the song, the lore embedded in the land”.

Sympoietic Assemblages

I quickly realised that I came into contact with a naturecultural placemaking which is part of a broader cultural context of border-crossings through artistic practices and forms of expression that I want to explore further. Academically speaking, I would describe Tuulikki’s project as what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls an “open-ended gathering” (2017, p. 22) of human and non-human ways of being that emerge in a “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical” (Haraway 2016, p.58) communicative situation. I would call this sympoietic assemblages (see Tsing 2017; Haraway 2016) because this concept  a) “captures the heterogeneity of living and nonliving beings, as well as the interconnectivity of the various elements of the ecosystem, in both form and content” (Ergin 2017, p.87) and b) “encompasses experiments in community making, ranging from poetry and visual art, literary criticism, and performance to walking, foraging, farming, cooking, and being outside along each other, whether human or other than human, in space and place” (Hume and Osborne 2018, p.2). Thus, sympoietic assemblages open the conversation about various kinds of relations: Between the arts and the environment(s), arts and sciences, humans and other-than-humans, between methods/concepts/ways of thinking in and across the disciplines, between different modes of being that find their (artistic) expression in a variety of forms.

Gathering Research Questions

However, complex combinations of artforms, media, resources, and ways of questioning the human position in nature such as Tuulikki’s directly question my role not only as ‘silent’ recipient of her performance(s), but as a comparatist.

There is no single message to be extracted from a work of art, interpretation becomes an artform itself. And what could be more important to literary and cultural studies than the art of understanding and communication (hermeneutics)? And what could prove more productive to gathering further research questions than incomprehension itself? What then, are the consequences for ecocritical investigations of sympoietic assemblages? While artists like Tuulikki combine scientific and artistic approaches (artistic research), I believe it is also necessary for scholars to cross approaches/methodologies of the different disciplines and develop a more complex, that is to say, multimodal approach.

What I need, then, is a language and methodology that allows me to describe all of this at once or, at least, positions me somewhere neither “objective” nor completely immersed. As of now, I envision myself as entering an ecotone (a transition area of ecosystems) where ecology, multimodality, artistic research, aesthetic educational processes and disruption meet. My questions concern content and form of sympoietic assemblages as well as their naturecultural context(s). How and in which contexts do artists create sympoietic assemblages? In which ways are the traditional disciplinary approaches, when taken alone, inadequate to engage with sympoietic assemblages? What attitude, knowledge and methodology is required to ‘interact’ with any form of multimodal artefact? To what extent do sympoietic assemblages bear the potential of aesthetic educational processes? How do they show different ways of seeing? How can recipients approach and translate aesthetic experiences into meaningful communication?

This field of research questions, then, enables me to explore the ‘in-between’ of disciplines, multispecies entanglements and (artistic) work processes. However, it doesn’t lead to arbitrary method pluralism but rather allows ‘us’ to learn and become ‘fluent’ in different ways of being. In the long run, I believe that multimodal ecologies yield a process that weaves together direct experience, imagination, scientific and artistic ways of knowing (see Brodie, Goodrich and Swanson 2016, p. 14). And, in addition, multimodal ecologies aim at including participants of various social groups and bridge communication gaps between artists, scientists and the public. ‘Reading’ as well as producing – in the sense of seeing, questioning and reflecting on – any form of multimodal artefact, like Tuulikki’s Away with the Birds, becomes a richer experience when considered in a broader context. Approaching urgent questions of the Anthropocene, then, is a matter of collaborative meaning-making and extracting compelling narratives for guiding cultural behaviour (see Brodie, Goodrich and Swanson 2016, p.11).

Kirsten Jüdt is a doctoral researcher at TU Dresden where she works in the interdisciplinary project “Disrupt!Research. Dynamic Collaboration under the Condition of Disruption”. She studied Comparative Literature and English/American Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) and English Literature & Drama Studies at Bath Spa University (England). She received her M.A. from Ruhr-University Bochum in 2020 with a thesis comparing intermediality and ecological communication in the works of Kathleen Jamie and Esther Kinsky. 

The research project “Disrupt!Research. Dynamic Collaboration under the Condition of Disruption” is part of the Excellence Measure “Disruption and Societal Change” at TU Dresden (TUDiSC) and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Freestate of Saxony under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder.

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Ergin, Meliz. The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Goodrich, Charles. “Entries into the Forest“. Forest Under Story. Creative Inquiry in an Old-growth Forest, edited by Nathaniel Brodie et.al., Ruth Kirk Book Fund, 2016, pp. 5–14.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Hume, Angela, und Gillian Osborne (eds.). Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. University of Iowa Press, 2018.

Lilley, Deborah. “Kathleen Jamie: Rethinking the Externality and Idealisation of Nature“. Green Letters, Bd. 17, Nr. 1, Februar 2013, S. 16–26. doi: 10.1080/14688417.2012.750841.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Trees, Stories, and Academia, or: What Literature has to do with Anything

In the very first session of the introduction to Comparative Literature at Ruhr-Uni Bochum, we were taught how to justify picking this subject to our parents. While I have told this anecdote a number of times as a funny twist on how my mother might have been the only person in the entire world who was actually relieved that her daughter decided to go for literature as her subject, I never quite lost the feeling of that first contact with what is now my profession. The feeling is an almost paranoid fear of being called out on doing what is actually a hobby (reading), a weird but all encompassing doubt about both the seriousness and relevance of my work. In short, it is the gut feeling that the “just” in “just fiction” might reflect more that a person’s attempt to discredit the capacity of literature to actually do stuff. 

By now I know that it is not just a feeling – it is the result of underfinanced humanities departments, expectations of “usefulness” and “applicability” that (being derived from engineering and, equally damaging for both cultures, from the natural sciences) have rarely anything to do with the work of a humanities scholar and almost never with the work of literary scholarship. It took me a while to get there, but the tip we were given in that introductory class followed those lines. While this is probably not the worst idea (even though I have doubts whether parents, who are not on board with you studying complit, will come around when the first thing you do is telling them about this French sociologist and cultural capital), I feel a growing sense of Bartleby-esque resistance to thinking of my work in these terms. So, if you came here to learn useful stuff about literature, I will disappoint you right away. This is not what I do. But what am I doing and why do I feel the need to do it despite constantly pointing out absurd conditions in academia and the need to tell people about it, who don’t even do what I do?

Looking for answers to these questions is part of the reason why I opened this blog. As with many things, there probably isn’t a straight response, but there might be more stories, and, as with many more things, for me, they have to do with trees. Not with roots, or branches, or leaves or all the single parts of a tree which lend themselves so well for (often all too heavy) metaphorization, but with the ways in which they require us to form words, stories and poetic texts in order to understand them. If I want answers to the question of why not only me but so many task themselves with writing about writing, talking about language and trying to find ways to put into text how texts become actors (many more meta-activities could be listed), then looking at trees, plants, symbioses and seemingly non-textual or -linguistic relationships might seem counterintuitive. But this is where – excuse the vegetal pun – the roots of the problem can be found.

A weed dinosaur, if you look (not too) closely, growing over human structures, not caring for what we think its species should be able to be

It would be all too easy to claim that it is literature’s job to make legible what otherwise remains incomprehensible. In novels, trees talk, in popular science, humans can read tree rings, in nature writing, humans follow tree roots everywhere – easy, isn’t it? Literary scholars, then, might be reproducing that job by making literature legible through analyzing, categorizing, historicizing. Too easy, indeed – what literary scholars do instead, or rather on top of that, is making things more complicated: Wohlleben tells you trees are friends and help each other? Here’s Johannes Wankhammer researching the different forms of Anthropomorphization and their pitfalls (Wankhammer). Ever heard of forest bathing? Here is Elisabeth Heyne showing you the different modes of perception (rain) forests induce (spoiler, not all are pleasant). And one more: You ask how trees become theme and motive in a text? Here am I telling you, they don’t, instead humans have to become tree-like to even see the giant plants. All of these texts and more are examples for how literary and cultural scholarship is much more than an explaining and archiving device. “We” don’t “just” communicate literature or other discipline’s results. Instead (or, again, on top of that) we find stories and keep telling them. We Reader poems and connect them to more poems, trees, (hi)stories. We excavate layers as much as we add new ones. The kind of knowledge this produces is actually very tree-like, because you can barely access it without becoming a little like it in the process. There is no writing about trees that isn’t making you a little bit arboreal while you’re reading. This might be special for the humanities and especially the Disziplinen dealing with literature. With us, you can see how we alienate ourselves from ourselves in order to melt into someone else and something else’s world (more on the barely hidden reference to hermeneutics and “Horizontverschmelzung” another time…).

In order to ‘see’ (read, hear, understand) the stories trees tell, you need to be able to connect them to other stories. This is what we do (I hereby claim): connect stories and provide a kind of guided tour through a jungle of texts and actors and things and more text, all the while leaving traces, changing the shrubs and producing more text. It sounds a little mysterious, doesn’t it? Well, it is and it is not. There is of course a way of learning how to do this, there are numerous ways of finding the benefit in studying literature…this is mine. Making things more complicated but also more exciting, making you understand less and being more adventurous with how you look around. Here’s to hoping you’ll join me…