Research Articles (English Studies)

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Browsing by Author "Martin, Julia"

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    Chapter 12 imagination and the eco-social crisis (or: why I write creative non-fiction)
    (Brill, 2020) Martin, Julia
    Green Matters reflects on the �unique cultural function� of literary texts with regard to environmental and ecological concerns. Another way of putting this is to ask: what do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse? I�d like to explore this question with regard to my own practice. After some years of writing fairly conventional journal articles and conference papers about literature and ecology, I now find myself among those practitioners in the Environmental Humanities who have been prompted by the urgency of the present crisis to reconsider the modes of our academic expression. This means that I wish to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature.
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    Hit by the machine: reading a local protest poem on the island of Symi, 120 years later
    (Routledge, 2024) Martin, Julia
    The poem ‘Χϵιμϵρινός όνϵιρος,’ or ‘Winter Dream,’ by Metrophanes I Kalafatas, was written in 1903 in the hope of influencing the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid Han II to ban the new deep-sea diving suits which had recently started to be used in the Aegean sponge industry at a devastating cost to both individuals and the social body. 120 years later, the poem’s bold rage against modernity and the Machine seems poignantly ineffectual and nostalgic. Yet its lyrical account of the non-commodifiable qualities of life on Symi before the arrival of the skafandro still offers a positive image for the contemporary renewal of sustainable eco-social community on the islands
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    The path which goes beyond: Danger on Peaks responds to suffering
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017) Martin, Julia
    Now well into his eighties, Gary Snyder continues to pursue lifetime habits of engagement and detachment in which the activities of literary work, spiritual practice, environmental activism, and family life are mutually informing. This leads, in the poetry, to an instructive response to personal suffering and to the suffering embodied in our present eco-social dilemmas. When asked in the 1996 Paris Review interview why, for all his environmental involvements, his writing is �surprisingly without disasters,� Snyder countered that �there are several poems that have very bad news in them� (Snyder and Weinberger 335).
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    Witness to the makeshift shore: Ecological practice in A Littoral Zone
    (UKZN, 2013) Martin, Julia
    This essay suggests that Douglas Livingstone's long poem 'A Littoral Zone' (1991), an explicit conversation between his work as an environmental scientist and his work as a poet, makes for a poetic statement that is, in various senses of the word, ecological. The sequence of poems draws extensively on scientific research in the field of bacteriology, is minutely located in 'place', evokes a secular sacramentalism in its representation of ecological interconnectedness, and situates the present moment in the context of deep time. In all, Livingstone's distinctive stance involves a tough, tender negotiation between irony, equanimity, wonder, and a sense of critical environmental urgency. Read twenty years later, his view of the South Coast littoral and of the world in which it is situated, seems prescient.