ABSTRACT

The language of ecocriticism is often one of mourning and melancholia: a mourning for the end of nature that has already come to pass. The emergent field of ecopoetics is driven, similarly, by a language of grief and its most emblematic forms are, accordingly, elegies. In this article, I make a case for reorienting the language of ecocriticism to make it more hospitable to the affects – bewilderment and anxiety: negative affects that are characterised by confusion and by an inability to act – which, I contend, might better characterise our relation to the changing climate. I make this argument through a reading of John Ashbery’s late work because he encapsulates the particular forms of inattention and anxiety that saturate the contemporary atmosphere. Ashbery’s poems are, in no typical sense, ‘ecopoems’, and the criticism his work invites is only incidentally ‘eco’. In this way, I make an argument about the incidental ecopoem that offers insight insofar as it captures the psychical stakes of states of bewilderment on our ability to think the future.

摘要

生态批评的语言通常是一种哀悼和忧郁：对已经发生的自然终结的哀悼。类似地，生态诗学这一新兴领域是由悲伤的语言驱动的，因此，其最具象征意义的形式是挽歌。在这篇文章中，我提出了一个案例，重新定位生态批评的语言，使其对影响更友好——困惑和焦虑：以混乱和无法行动为特征的负面影响——我认为，这可能更好地描述我们的与气候变化的关系。我通过阅读约翰·阿什伯里 (John Ashbery) 晚期作品来提出这个论点，因为他概括了充斥着当代氛围的注意力不集中和焦虑的特殊形式。阿什伯里的诗在没有典型意义上是“生态诗”，他的作品引起的批评只是顺便说一下“生态”。通过这种方式，我就偶然的生态诗提出了一个论点，它提供了洞察力，因为它抓住了我们思考未来能力的困惑状态的心理风险。