Edgelands, virtual lands, and wastelands: 'new nature writing' and the Anthropocene wilds

边缘地、虚拟地和荒地：“新自然写作”和人类世荒野

• 批准号: 2287513
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2287513
• 关键词: Edgelands; virtual; lands; wastelands; new

This thesis will explore what prose writing from the genre of 'new nature writing' can tell us about the meanings of 'wildness' in the Anthropocene. New nature writing (Cowley, 2008), defined as nature, travel and place writing from the last twenty years, is arguably the strongest cultural response to the climate crisis. It reflects an increasing interest in the natural world and a need to think about it differently, and is therefore the best place to begin answering the questions this project poses. It will expose alternative understandings and locations of the wild that reflect the reality of life in the Anthropocene, and how best to navigate it. New nature writing exhibits a move away from binary understandings and is instead characterised by interdisciplinary, experimental accounts of the non-human world, 'drawing upon autobiographical and travel narratives, art, literature and folklore' (Hunt, 2012, 71). These writers are 'creative and self-reflexive' (Smith, 2018, 5), offering personal reactions to the climate catastrophe and the stresses of daily human complicity. New nature writing offers a vision of wildness that can be found anywhere, by anyone. It is a democratic and cosmopolitan wild; a wildness of inner-city pavement cracks and edgelands, of the mind, body and domestic, of human history and of deep time, which is celebrated alongside the aesthetic grandeur of mountain, valley and moor. Kathleen Jamie finds time for the wild 'between the laundry and the fetching kids from school' (2005, 39), and Robert Macfarlane begins The Wild Places (2008) by walking straight out of his suburban front door. These writers dissolve boundaries, blur lines between human and animal, and celebrate the primal alongside the technological. Landscapes are not pristine, but reimagined, resistant to easy definition yet celebrated in every changing evocation. Having outlined a rough definition of the new wild, this project will explore four key sites in which new nature writers locate it. The first will be 'edgelands', a term given to the neglected peripheral fringes of modern Britain, in which wildlife flourishes unchecked. Using Rob Cowen's Common Ground (2015), and Julian Hoffman's The Small Heart of Things (2012), I will unpack the key concepts of coexistence, indefinability, and imagination in relation to wildness, in order to locate the edgelands of modern Britain as wild, and ask what we can learn from such sites about our attitudes towards categories of nature in the Anthropocene. The second section will focus on the notion of wastelands, using the vibrant manmade and organic diversity located in Tim Dee's Landfill (2018) and Jamie's Findings. By exploring the material entanglements that pervade life in the Anthropocene and the temporal peculiarities they represent, I will seek to posit wastelands as frontiers of the spatiotemporal unknown, and therefore the wild.The focus will then move to the notion of 'recycled' or 'remodelled' landscapes, considering how the movements of rewilding and urban landscape 'rehabilitation' create environments based upon definitions of the wild that vary in their treatment of the human. By analysing George Monbiot's Feral (2014) and James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life (2015), I will examine the types of environments that we strive to create/recreate, and question for whom we do this.Finally, I will explore virtual evocations of wildness, considering how, in their interlinking of human and non-human agencies, futuristic technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence can illuminate our relations to the wild and the wider material world. I will also examine the presence of new nature writers and their fans on social media in order to locate these metatextual eco-environments as 'areas of common ground' (Cowen, 2015), and ask what the future of the wild might be in this increasingly digital world.

本论文将探讨“新自然写作”的散文写作，如何告诉我们“野性”在人类世的意义。新自然写作（Cowley，2008），定义为过去二十年的自然，旅行和地方写作，可以说是对气候危机最强烈的文化反应。它反映了人们对自然世界日益增长的兴趣和以不同方式思考自然世界的需要，因此是开始回答这个项目提出的问题的最佳场所。它将揭示反映人类世生活现实的其他理解和野外位置，以及如何最好地驾驭它。新自然写作展示了从二元理解的转变，而是以非人类世界的跨学科实验性描述为特征，“利用自传和旅行叙事，艺术，文学和民间传说”（Hunt，2012，71）。这些作家是“创造性和自我反思的”（史密斯，2018年，5），提供个人对气候灾难和日常人类共谋的压力的反应。新的自然写作提供了一个可以在任何地方，任何人都可以找到的野性视野。这是一个民主的和世界性的荒野;一个由市中心的人行道裂缝和边缘地带组成的荒野，一个由思想、身体和家庭组成的荒野，一个由人类历史和深刻的时间组成的荒野，它与山脉、山谷和摩尔的美学宏伟一起被庆祝。凯瑟琳·杰米（Kathleen Jamie）“在洗衣服和接孩子放学之间”（2005年，第39页）找到了狂野的时间，而罗伯特·麦克法兰（Robert Macfarlane）则直接走出郊区的前门，开始了《狂野的地方》（2008年）。这些作家消除了界限，模糊了人类和动物之间的界限，并在技术的同时庆祝原始。景观不是原始的，但重新想象，抵抗简单的定义，但在每一个不断变化的招魂庆祝。在概述了新荒野的粗略定义后，该项目将探索新自然作家所定位的四个关键地点。第一个是“边缘地带”，这是一个被忽视的现代英国边缘地带的术语，在那里野生动物不受限制地生存。利用罗布·考恩（Rob Cowen）的《共同点》（Common Ground，2015年）和朱利安·霍夫曼（Julian Hoffman，2012年）的《事物的小心脏》（The Small Heart of Things，2012年），我将解开与荒野相关的共存、不可定义性和想象力等关键概念，以便将现代英国的边缘地带定位为荒野，并询问我们可以从这些地点了解到我们对人类世自然类别的态度。第二部分将重点介绍荒地的概念，使用位于Tim Dee的垃圾填埋场（2018）和Jamie的发现中充满活力的人造和有机多样性。通过探索人类世生活中普遍存在的物质纠缠以及它们所代表的时间特性，我将寻求将荒地视为时空未知的前沿，因此也是荒野。然后，重点将转移到“回收”或“改造”景观的概念上，考虑到野化运动和城市景观“恢复”如何创造基于野生定义的环境，人的待遇。通过分析乔治·蒙比奥的《野性》（2014）和詹姆斯·雷班克斯的《牧羊人的生活》（2015），我将研究我们努力创造/重建的环境类型，并质疑我们为谁这样做。最后，我将探索野性的虚拟唤起，考虑如何在人类和非人类机构的相互联系中，虚拟现实和人工智能等未来技术可以阐明我们与自然和更广阔的物质世界的关系。我还将研究新的自然作家和他们的粉丝在社交媒体上的存在，以便将这些元文本生态环境定位为“共同点”（Cowen，2015），并询问在这个日益数字化的世界中，野生动物的未来可能是什么。