From Issue Editors

Abstract

The special dossier of the sixth volume of Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies has been prepared based on the graduate conference titled “Ecocriticism and Sustainability” organized by the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent University on October 14, 2022. Our dossier, “Ecocriticism, Sustainability and Literature” emphasizes how ecocriticism, considered both as a discipline and a methodology, is perceived in the fields of literary and cultural studies in Turkey, highlighting its intersections with issues such as human and more-than-human belonging, identity, body, home, gender, and so forth. Especially since the early 2000s, we have come across important works in Turkey that critically bring together literature and environmental studies. For example, the initial works and compilations of scholars like Serpil Opperman, Ufuk Özdağ, Sinan Akıllı, Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, and Kim Fortuny demonstrate how ecology is textualized, emphasizing the necessity of addressing the environment in a holistic manner, alongside both human and nonhuman communities. These contributions have guided the diversification of eco-critical discussions in Turkey.

Ecocriticism prioritizes the examination of all possible relationships between literature and the environment through ecological concepts, methodologies, and orientations. It explores encounters, relationships, and often impasses that manifest between humans and animals, as well as all other forms of life, while placing a significant emphasis on how our shared living spaces with other creatures are depicted and imagined in literary works, largely focusing on issues of representation.

Ecocriticism found its systematic place between culture, literary studies and criticism for the first time through William Rueckert’ s Literature and Ecology published in 1978. Rueckert laid the foundation for the field, emphasizing the importance of applying ecological concepts to literary studies. According to Rueckert, ecocriticism can be seen as an integral part of environmental humanities, which investigate relationships between humans and nonhumans, the deep history of the Earth, environmental transformations, changing micro and macro climates, and geochemical forces.

Ecocriticism examines parallels between literature and ecology and critically discusses literary texts within the framework of ecological awareness. Moreover, it highlights the significant role played by humans in understanding their position in the ecosphere, while raising awareness of environmental thought and drawing attention to ethical and aesthetic issues posed by the global ecological crisis. Today, ecocriticism is closely related to theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical aspects of posthuman theories, new materialist approaches, ecofeminism, and other fields, especially in the Anthropocene era where human impact on the world is at its peak.

For instance, Rosi Braidotti, through a postmodernist approach, examines Deleuze’s thought and proposes abandoning anthropocentric worldviews in favor of adopting a feminist perspective. In posthuman approaches, she presents a political discourse incorporating ecological sensitivity and feminist understanding, challenging Eurocentric humanist views and criticizing the human-centric design of the Western world. Similarly, concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblage theory, “Bruno Latour’s “sociology of associations” and “actor-network theory,” Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism,” Brian Masumi’s “affective turn,” and Karen Barad’s “agential realism” insistently remind us of the ecological principle that everything is interconnected.

Ecocriticism intersects with literature through the understanding of storytelling not only as a necessary tool to imagine a better world, but also as a means of survival. Especially in Donna Haraway’s Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene (Duke UP, 2016) and Rebecca Solnit’s Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket, 2023), ecological thought opens up a field where the borders between fact and fiction are blurred, and where genetics, anthropology, literary criticism and science fiction converge.

The essays in the dossier move beyond Rueckert’s definition, incorporating the aforementioned areas and concepts, thus expanding the discussions on ecocriticism and sustainability. The diverse types of essays in the dossier, ranging from research articles to book reviews, critical essays to interviews, and research notes, respond to the multifaceted nature and diversity of ecocriticism while demonstrating how ecology is textualized by drawing from contemporary posthuman theories, ecofeminism, feminist new materialism, affect theory, actor-network theory, speculative realism, and other fields.

The dossier features six research articles. “‘Cosmic Idiots’ as a Representation of the Unknown in Timeless “ Süheyla Abanoz focuses on Latife Tekin’s latest novel Timeless, characterized here as a pandemic narrative. Abanoz’s work examines the novel through the concept of the “cosmic fool,” as described by Isabelle Stengers, representing the irrational other, and through Hubert Zaph’s practice of viewing literature as a field of cultural ecology. The article explores the relational aspects of both concepts within the narrative, tracing the otherness of the characters, as well as the constant transformation they go through. Through a close reading of the novel’s portrayal of the irrational other, the article also considers the transitions between humans and animals, friends and lovers, to articulate ecology through ambiguity.

“An Examination of Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Novel Yazsonu within the Context of Ecological Consciousness and Political Reality” by Merve Çopuroğlu approaches the novel from the intersection of ecocriticism and discourse analysis. Through close readings that highlight the text’s self-referential and sensory-centered narration, the article examines Yazsonu as a text that goes beyond the events of March 12, opening up space for the agency of other living beings in nature.

Evren Haspolat’s research article, “An Ecofeminist Perspective on Drawing the Boundaries if the Vitruvian Male Human: The film The Snow and the Bear,” focuses on the 2022 film Snow and the Bear directed by Selcen Ergun. The article explores how the film addresses the intersection of climate change, the societal roles of women, and power dynamics within the patriarchy. Using the imagery of the Vitruvian Man, a symbol of traditional masculinity in Western thought, the article analyzes how the film goes beyond conventional narratives.

“Transmission of Ecological Memory: Lebib’s Kahtiyye on Famine in Diyarbakır” by Aslı Nur Memiş focuses on the severe famine of 1803 and Lebib’s poem addressing the famine of 1757, as recounted by Diyarbakır Governor Timur Pasha. It discusses a poem included in the governor’s petition, which requests food aid.  The analysis draws from memory studies, ecology, and historiography, inviting the reader to contemplate notions of agency and literary genre.

Sevgin Özer’s article titled “A Story About the Growth of Humans and Plants Together: This is Radio Şarampol” focuses on Şükran Yiğit’s narrative that emphasizes the interaction between plants and humans. The article discusses ecocriticism in a spectrum ranging from the concept of plant democracy to solidarity among city, home, plant, and women, inviting readers to reconsider both the relationship between plants and humans and Şükran Yiğit’s novels.

Ayşe Duygu Yavuz’s article, titled “The Problem of Constructing the Green Literature Canon in Turkish Literature with Ecocriticism,” introduces ecocriticism’s emergence in anglophile criticism, to then trace the range of ecocriticism in contemporary Turkish literature and literary criticism, across the spectrum of pastoralism and posthumanism, through an array of texts including, but not limited to, Aganta Burina Burinata by Halikarnas Balikcisi (Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı), to Deniz Kustu by Yasar Kemal’s, and to The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman: Water by Buket Uzuner.

There are three “Critical Essays” in the dossier. In “Critique of the Anthropocene and Humanised Animals in İzzet Yasar’s ‘Slaughterhouses of Glass’,” Büşra Bilgiç offers a close reading of Izzet Yasar’s stories from an ecocritical lens that ranges from the theories of Donna Haraway to David Wood’s, and to critical animal studies, to ultimately offer a critique of neoliberalism and the Anthropocene.

“Between Steps: Nature, Thought, and Existence,” by İlayda Canol takes its cue from “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” by the renowned German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, to contemplate the relationship between walking, mind, and imagination through the dualisms of the internal and external, purpose and destination.

Mine Özyurt Kılıç’s essay on “The Snail in the Flower Garden of Literature: Hogarth Press’s Call for Slowness,” follows the ecological traces of Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf in 1917, in the stories “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”. Like the visual and verbal descriptions of snails in Virginia Woolf’s texts, Özyurt Kılıç’s essay encourages slow reading practices that facilitate staying and being in the moment, if not facilitate moments of being.

In the interview section, Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim discusses “The 50 Shades of Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices” with Başak Ağın and Gizem Yılmaz, the editors. They explore both the purpose and the contribution of the book to cultural and literary studies in both international academia and in the fields of ecology and environmental humanities in Turkey.

In the “Book Review”, Tuğba Çanakçı reviews Gizem Yılmaz’s study Cosmic Choreography: The Elemental Dance of Bodies. The review focuses on the critical discussion of the ecological journey  of elements in both Western and Anatolian philosophy.

As in every issue, we would like to express our gratitude to our editorial and advisory board members, field editors, authors and reviewers who contributed to the preparation of this issue. Finally, we would like to remind you that Nesir, which will devote its seventh issue dated October 2024 to the file topic “Fictional Translators in Literature and Cinema” under the issue editorship of Dr. Nefise Kahraman, is waiting for qualified and original works of literary researchers on this subject until August 1, 2024.