Hardy’s Trees

IF 0.2 2区文学 0 LITERATURE

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE Pub Date : 2021-06-01 DOI:10.1525/ncl.2021.76.1.92

Maxwell Sater

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders” (pp. 92–115) This essay attends to one of the stranger episodes in Thomas Hardy’s fiction: the inexplicably linked deaths of John South and the elm tree outside his house. I argue that this subplot is of central importance to The Woodlanders (1887) and to Hardy’s ecological thinking more generally. Hardy posits an episode that resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. Its senselessness, I contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, and rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations of knowing as the foundation of ecology. By reading The Woodlanders alongside Cavell, I suggest that Hardy develops an ecological mode of relation dependent neither on knowledge of nor on continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, on a negotiation of the epistemological and ontological limits inhering between, in this instance, humans and trees. For Hardy, humane ecological relations are possible in spite of those limits; in fact, seeking to transcend them, as the elm tree plot parodically demonstrates, can be counterproductive.

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哈代的树

麦克斯韦尔·萨特，《哈代的树:《林地人》中的生态与知识问题》(第92-115页)这篇文章关注托马斯·哈代小说中一个奇怪的情节:约翰·索斯的死与他房子外的榆树之间莫名其妙的联系。我认为，这一次要情节对《林地人》(1887)和哈代更广泛的生态思想都至关重要。哈代假设了一个抵制叙事调整的情节:简单地说，它没有意义。我认为，它的无意义表明了对斯坦利·卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)所称的作为生态学基础的认识关系的更广泛的不适和拒绝。通过与卡维尔一起阅读《林地人》，我认为哈代发展了一种生态关系模式，这种关系既不依赖于对非人类世界的知识，也不依赖于与非人类世界的连续性，而是依赖于对人类与树木之间固有的认识论和本体论界限的协商。对哈代来说，尽管存在这些限制，但人道的生态关系是可能的;事实上，试图超越它们，就像榆树的情节所表现的那样，可能会适得其反。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE LITERATURE-

CiteScore

0.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： From Ozymandias to Huckleberry Finn, Nineteenth-Century Literature unites a broad-based group of transatlantic authors and poets, literary characters, and discourses - all discussed with a keen understanding of nineteenth -century literary history and theory. The major journal for publication of new research in its field, Nineteenth-Century Literature features articles that span across disciplines and explore themes in gender, history, military studies, psychology, cultural studies, and urbanism. The journal also reviews annually over 70 volumes of scholarship, criticism, comparative studies, and new editions of nineteenth-century English and American literature.