Serenella Iovino

The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and how Interpretation Works

In the past years, the agentic and semiotic properties of material reality have been the focus of many areas of research, producing an exuberant “turn to the material” also in the debate about the humanities. This “material turn” is indeed a broad conversation across disciplines, combining physics and sociology, biology and anthropology, ontology and epistemology, feminist theories, archaeology, and geography, just to name a few. The paradigm emerging from this debate prompts not only fresh nonanthropocentric vistas, but also possible “ways of understanding the agency, significance, and ongoing transformative power of the world – ways that account for myriad [...] phenomena that are material, discursive, human, more-than-human, corporeal and technological” (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 5). The underlying task of this discourse is that of providing an onto-epistemological framework for non-dichotomous modes to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, matter and mind, nature and culture. A crossroad of scientific and humanistic research by definition, the environmental humanities is the field in which this “turn” received foremost attention. Ecocritical theory responds to this conceptual conversation by heeding material dynamics via an enlargement of its hermeneutical field of application. A material ecocriticism, in other words, investigates matter both in texts and as a text, elaborating a reflection on the way “bodily natures and discursive forces express their interaction whether in representations or in their concrete reality” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). Drawing from the philosophical and scientific insights of the new materialisms, this essay explores the main points of material ecocriticism, focusing in particular on the notion of “narrative agency” and on the way interpreting “stories of matter” becomes possible as an ecocritical practice. Serenella Iovino, University of Turin E-Mail: serenella.iovino@unito.it DOI 10.1515/anglia-2015-0006 Anglia 2015, 133(1): 69–86