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Publication Metadata only (Post) humanist tangles in social ecology and new materialism(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter argues that entanglements lie at the core of two prominent schools of ecological thought: social ecology and new materialism. While social ecology, spearheaded by Murray Bookchin, stresses the tangle of ecological and socio-political issues and advocates for a transformative viewpoint in both spheres, new materialism destabilizes the nature/culture dichotomy by reading the production of matter and meaning as co-extensive praxes and by defining phenomena, in Karen Barad’s terms, as the “ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies.” Ergin reads social ecology and new materialism, respectively, in relation to deconstruction to tease out the different models of entanglement in each school of thought and to elucidate what is at stake in the motif of entanglement. She rethinks these three strands of thought vis-à-vis each other to capture some of the breadth and variety in reconceptualizations of natural-social and material-discursive entanglements.Publication Metadata only Comparative ecocriticism: an introduction(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428The introduction explains the rationale of the book, highlighting its contribution to ecocritical theory, comparative ecocriticism, and ecopoetics. The theoretical novelty of the book derives from its comparative and cross-disciplinary approach in the first two chapters which investigate the theoretically fertile links between deconstruction, social ecology, and new materialism. Ergin makes a compelling case for a new poetics structured around the concept of “entanglement,” and outlines entanglements in these three strands of thought so as to demonstrate the relevance of this concept in theoretical terms. She then examines the ecological intersections of nature and society through a comparative analysis of the works of the American poet Juliana Spahr and the Turkish writer Latife Tekin. As the first book-length study of comparative Turkish and American ecocriticism, the book responds to the immense need for theorizing about ecology and poetics across new geographical, cultural, and linguistic contexts.Publication Metadata only Deconstructive ecocriticism(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter proposes advancing a mode of ecocritical thought free of any transcendental notion of nature, and explores the distinction between nature writing and ecological literature by highlighting the contrast between the Romantic and the revised sublime. Ergin argues that contemporary eco-narratives focus on the revised sublime to present a complex view of natural-social entanglements in light of the new scale of the capitalist-industrialist system and technology. She then turns to Derrida’s work to foreground entanglement as a key concept in deconstruction and to rethink its benefits for ecocritical thought. Ergin introduces the notion of ‘ecological text’ to emphasize textuality as a form of entanglement that proves useful in thinking about ecological interdependence and uncertainty. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the ethics of complicity and responsibility by articulating our embeddedness in the ecological (con)text and its material-discursive network.Publication Metadata only Entwined narratives: Latife Tekin's ecopoetics(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428N/APublication Metadata only Epilogue: entanglement and eco-responsibility(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter argues that the notion of an ecological text and its entangled taxonomies demand a revised readership, one that prevents us from provoking irreversible ruptures in the intricate ecological text and enables us to envisage ecological forms of co-inhabitation. If there is no biological, ontological, or philosophical context that can escape the movement of différance, then the ontology of being is a relational ontology of being-with-one-another and of contact. Contemporary critics and poets replace the human (master) narrative with a more complex account of material and discursive forces, and radically change the way we conceptualize ontic and semantic boundaries. Entanglements regenerate the ecological text toward a future without a teleological content. Rather than reacting to this futurity with anxiety, we may benefit from contemplating the ethical implications of this eco-ontological ambiguity.Publication Metadata only Intimate multitudes: Juliana Spahr's ecopoetics(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter inquires into Juliana Spahr’s ecopoetics to tease out entanglements on the level of form and language. First‚ it examines the tangle of various genres and literary traditions that comprise her work. Then it focuses on thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs‚ and “Unnamed DragonFly Species” and “The Incinerator” from Well Then There Now, to explore Spahr’s connective reading methodology that interweaves the material and the semiotic, the personal and the political, and the local and the global. Spahr forges a posthumanist poetics that embodies the collective voices of human and nonhuman beings and the dynamic relationalities emerging from the ecological text. Foregrounding three concepts central to Spahr’s work—dis/connection, complicity, and accountability—Ergin highlights the entanglement of local and global ecologies and politics, thereby reconfiguring our understanding of temporal and spatial scales.Publication Metadata only Juliana Spahr's anticolonial ecologies(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter focuses on environmental-political entanglements in Juliana Spahr’s work. The first part examines two place-based poetic essays from Well Then There Now. Whereas “Dole Street” consists of narrative history, photography, and personal memories about the postcolonial city, “2199 Kalia Road” traces the relationship between neocolonialism and environmental decay. Ergin uses these essays to provoke a discussion of the relationship between bodies, ecologies, and politics, and to explore the ways in which postcolonial mili/tourism interferes with Hawaiian ecology. The second part focuses on Spahr’s anticolonial poems from Well Then There Now and investigates material-discursive entanglements in “Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another,” “Sonnets,” and “Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours.” Ergin shows that these poems foreground interconnected systems and irregularities of identification to resist colonial taxonomies and to expose the eco-ontological ambiguity at the heart of all existence.Publication Metadata only Latife tekin's urban ecologies(Palgrave, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428This chapter examines the interlaced environmental-political issues in Latife Tekin’s Rüyalar ve Uyanışlar Defteri and Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. Ergin first explores the continuum between urbanization, ecological decay, and ecopolitical resistance in Rüyalar. She then turns to Berji Kristin to demonstrate that Tekin uses waste as an entry point to inquire into the tangle of material and socio-political forces that constantly change the terrain we inhabit. Ergin focuses on waste cultures in marginal settlements and the materiality of waste, respectively, to investigate the movement between the environmental and the socio-political. She argues that both Spahr and Tekin open posthuman subjectivity to affective connections with (non)human otherness without compromising the possibility of political agency and responsibility.