The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific (...) shifts in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the geopoetics of Scott Walker’s lyrics and sonics, where the term geopoetics is construed as a concern with the geographical, geological, ecological and cosmological in...

The author analyses the relation between the literary character and the place in Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Most. Z kroniki naszego miasta. The author attempts to prove that places shown by Herling-Grudziński play a significant role in the writer’s biography and also influence the way of acting and decisions of literary characters created by the writer. Using geopoetics as its starting point, this perspective puts emphasis on the category of place considered in both geographic and literary dimension. In her interpretation of the (...) short story by Herling-Grudziński, the author attempts to show that the bridge affects the life of the main character, his behaviour and attitude to the world. The article also offers a summary of critical approaches to the presentation of space motifs in the literary works of Herling-Grudziński. The context for the analysis is provided by the writer’s biography which highlights his personal experience connected with private places. The analytical key to unlock their senses is taken from geopoetics as the perspective which may enable us to find new content in the unique literary output of Herling-Grudziński. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article a pour objectif d’introduire la géoesthésique, une approche des sciences de la culture traitant des interactions entre l’espace et la réception sémiotique. Le tournant spatial des arts et des sciences de la fin du vingtième a inspiré la création de plusieurs nouvelles approches liées à l’espace et au territoire. La Géopoétique de Kenneth White, la Géocritique de Westphal et plus tard de Prieto et Tally, la Géoesthétique de Quirós et Imhoff et éventuellement même la géosymbolique travaillée par (...) Mario Bédard et Christiane Lahaie (2008). C’est en remarquant l’absence, parmi toutes ces approches, d’une approche dont le point central serait, non pas l’espace, mais la réception, et son lien avec l’espace, que Louis Hébert nous a suggérer de concevoir et de rédiger les prémisses d’une telle approche. La géoesthésique serait ainsi une approche pratique et expérimentale grâce à laquelle on pourrait observer l’impact que peut avoir l’espace sur la réception sémiotique d’un élément donné ou l’influence d’une réception sémiotique donnée sur la perception d’un espace fixe. (shrink)

The British government's White Paper on science together with government research council reports are used as a basis for critiquing current science policy and its intensifying orientation, British and worldwide, towards industrial and military development. The critique draws particulary on Plato and Bacon as yardsticks to address who science is for, what values it honours and where current policy departs from imperatives of socio-ecological justice. Metaphors of the ' Emperor 's new clothes' and incremental spectral shift in attitude help illuminate (...) both the problems and ways forward. The paper calls for a re-integration of classical perspectives with added insights, often ecofeminist, from philosophy, poetics and a theology of reverence. Predication on the values of love, interconnectedness and orientation towards childrens' all-round development should be central to curricular reform. Consistent with the views of Plato, the original founder of the Academy, the utilitarian role of science ought to be balanced with a contemplative role of science as the art of knowing ourselves in relation to nature. Only with such a holistic academic approach can it adequately rise to providing a pedagogy of authentic human development, service to the poor and remedies, rather than contribution, to the ongoing destruction of nature. (shrink)