Affect, Ecosickness and Materialism

Friday 10 July 2015
15.00 – 16.30
University of Utrecht, Ravensteinzaal (Kromme Nieuwegracht 80)
Organised by the Benelux Association for the Study of Art, Culture and Environment

In our final seminar of the academic year we will explore Heather Houser’s book Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. Affect and Environment, in tandem with Agnieszka Wołodźko’s work on affect and materiality in posthuman visual culture.

Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn (Poland) and an MA in The Philosophy of Art History from Leiden University. She is a PhD candidate in the cultural disciplines at Leiden University investigating ways in which art, by using living bodies as its medium, reveal overall cultural, social and political significance of affect in the contemporary understanding of biotechnologically manipulated bodies. In particular she is interested in how art comes with ethical concerns and responsibilities within its creative practice which in turn reveals the aesthetico-ethical implications for the new material meaning production. Her recent publication in English is “Materiality of affect. How art can reveal the more subtle realities of an encounter,” in Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (ed.) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life, Rodopi: Amsterdam/New York, 2015.

Heather Houser’s Ecosickness:

The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between these forms of threat and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction establishes that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical dilemmas through data alone and must call on the sometimes surprising emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. Heather Houser shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it.

For more details on BASCE see our website: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/basce or contact us via mailbasce@gmail.com