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(2017) German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Speaking stones
material agency and interaction in Christian Enzensberger's geschichte der natur
Caroline Schaumann
pp. 165-182
This chapter investigates the agentic dimensions of pebbles in Christian Enzensberger's Nicht Eins und Doch: Geschichte der Natur. While stone is a material usually scorned for its inanimateness and has been infamously denounced as "worldless' by Martin Heidegger, Enzensberger lends stone a voice, thus defying a longstanding hierarchy that since the Middle Ages has placed lithic matter at the very bottom of worldly existence. Yet Enzensberger's novel can be read as a continuation and expansion of Heidegger's essay "Der Feldweg." In an experimental, multilingual, and imaginative narrative about sensual encounters with the nonhuman world, Enzensberger's text elucidates a greater range of human experience that emerges when humans give up their claim to exclusive agency to explore, in reversed manner, their entanglement with the earth.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_10
Full citation:
Schaumann, C. (2017)., Speaking stones: material agency and interaction in Christian Enzensberger's geschichte der natur, in C. Schaumann (ed.), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 165-182.
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