Terrain-Texts: Thinking Nature Writing in the Anthropocene with Esther Kinsky, Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour

Abstract

This contribution addresses the relations of nature writing and the Anthropocene discourse in contemporary German literature. My reading of Esther Kinsky’s novel River [Am Fluss] (2014) reveals how nature writing of the Anthropocene (as Christian Hummelsund Voie puts it) resists an all too easy declaration of the “end of nature.” Hence, terminologies of Anthropocene discourse, such as Timothy Morton’s “ecology without nature,” prove to be partially inadequate to describe contemporary nature writing. Kinsky’s terrain texts (Gelände-Texte) perform an ongoing multiplication of natures, cultures, and their entanglements, as well as their separations. Yet, the texts’ aesthetic relations to their environment are too self-reflective and complex as to be fully captured by Morton’s “ambient poetics.” Drawing on Latourian theory, this paper therefore proposes a reconceptualization of nature writing’s poetic form, aiming for a better understanding of its counter discoursive force in modernity as well as in the Anthropocene.

Hackney Wick was a place apart, an area left behind, bashed and bedraggled by the times and time’s passing, a site defined by its own rules of emptiness and wildness … inscribed with its own alphabet of symbols, that were scrumbling, rustling, skewed and charred … a palimpsest hard to decipher yet everywhere beckoning with glimmers of legibility…

—Esther Kinsky, River

The translations in this article are mine, except for the quotes from Am Fluss (2013), where I follow the English translation by Ian Galbraith, published as River in 2018 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.