Caroline Schaumann

Speaking Stones: Material Agency and Interaction in Christian Enzensberger’s Geschichte der Natur

This chapter investigates the agentic dimensions of pebbles in Christian Enzensberger’s Nicht Eins und Doch: Geschichte der Natur. While stone is a material usually scorned for its inanimateness and has been infamously denounced as “worldless” by Martin Heidegger, Enzensberger lends stone a voice, thus defying a longstanding hierarchy that since the Middle Ages has placed lithic matter at the very bottom of worldly existence. Yet Enzensberger’s novel can be read as a continuation and expansion of Heidegger’s essay “Der Feldweg.” In an experimental, multilingual, and imaginative narrative about sensual encounters with the nonhuman world, Enzensberger’s text elucidates a greater range of human experience that emerges when humans give up their claim to exclusive agency to explore, in reversed manner, their entanglement with the earth.

The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt and the new world, by Andrea Wulf, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, xix +473 pp.,

Alexander von Humboldt is currently enjoying a renaissance in the English-speaking world, thanks in no small part to Andrea Wulf, a historian and writer who was born in India, spent her childhood i...