Ecocritical Perspectives – Humanity, Nature, Literature, 7.5 ECTS (LVGN13)

Literature I: Analyzing and Interpreting Literary Texts, 7.5 ECTS (LVGN01)

Literature I: History of Literature from 1870 to Today, 7.5 ECTS (LV0001)

Literature II: Term Paper, 7.5 ECTS (LV2000)

Bachelor's Course in Literature: Bachelor's Essay, 15 ECTS (LV3000)

 

My research engages with questions raised at the intersections between literary theory and the other-than-human humanities. In this I am concerned both with the unique ability of literature to address existential and ethical issues and with protecting literature and literary criticism from purely instrumental assignments. My intellectual influences stem from continental philosophy – primarily deconstruction – posthumanism, and psychoanalysis.

 

Dissertation

My dissertation, "Specters of Animals: Creaturely Metaphors in D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Virginia Woolf," addresses a prevalent skepticism against metaphorical readings within fields such as cultural animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism. Focusing upon animal metaphors in three modernist novels, I show that this wariness is largely a result of a (mis)conception of metaphor as a trope of substitution. Instead, the dissertation proposes an alternative theorization of metaphor, conceptualizing it as a spectral form of figurativity. As such, metaphor offers an invitation to otherness within linguistic artworks.

As part of this theorization, I analyze peripheral animal figures in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), H.D.’s Asphodel (written in the 1920s), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). These novels exemplify how questions of both animality and metaphor come into particular focus in many texts from the early twentieth century. In their modernist renegotiations of literary conventions, the three works display how the inevitable deferral of final meaning into the future is always haunted by the past, thus destabilizing the presence of what ‘is.’

The study is informed by a trans- and interdisciplinary perspective, primarily influenced by deconstruction, metaphor theory, animal studies, and posthumanism, while also gathering insights from fields such as zoology and ethology. In particular, the project draws upon Jacques Derrida’s hauntology in order to spectralize (or make deconstructive) Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic conception of metaphor as simultaneously stating is and is not, and as a seeing as that invents rather than reports resemblance. This theoretical framework shows how metaphor is creatively alive—animated—but therefore also creaturely vulnerable—mortal.

It is this susceptible creatureliness that constitutes metaphor’s possibility for literarity, for the sake of which the issue of metaphor is an ethical one that reaches beyond the problem of animal representation, toward questions of how to read and translate not just a text, but any other; of the sacrifice necessary for all forms of relationality; and of how the future may be welcomed in its absolute unknowability.

 

Research Interests

Literary Theory, Literature and Philosophy, Deconstruction, Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernism.

 

Advisors

Frida Beckman and Ingemar Haag

 

Oral Presentations

"Entangled Figures: The Intertwinements of Animal Metaphors." AHRC International Conference, Oxford, September 2023.

"Flickering Figures: Modes of Reading Animals in The Rainbow." The London Lawrence Group, April 2023.

"Blood-Conscious Supplementation: Jacques Derrida Facing D.H. Lawrence's 'Snake.'" The 15th International D. H. Lawrence Conference, Taos, New Mexico, July 2022.

"In Defense of Metaphor: A Myth of Presence and an Animation of Representation." Derrida Today Conference, Washington DC, June 2022.

"A Spectral Dog Wordlessly Speaking Metaphorically in D.H. Lawrences' The Rainbow." D. H. Lawrence, Distance and Proximity: An International Virtual Symposium, online, July 2021.

"Peripheral Aesthetics: Butterfly Patterns in H.D.'s Asphodel." Revolutions in Reading: Literary Practice in Transition, online, June 2021.

"More Swallows to Follow: Repetitive Animals in H.D.'s Asphodel." Beastly Modernisms Conference, Glasgow, September 2019.

"Becoming Posthumanist: Deleuzian Animals in The Rainbow." The International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, April 2019.

“Reading Animals Literally: The Activism of Desymbolization.” The European Conference for Critical Animal Studies, Lund, October 2017.

”Empathizing through Fundamental Difference: An Exploration of Empathy with the Non-Human Other in D.H. Lawrence's ’Fish.’” The European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference, Basel, June 2017.

”'Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts': Posthuman Absoluteness and Relativity in Women in Love.” The International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, March 2017.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• More Swallows to Follow: Sweeping, Swirling, Wheeling Turns in H.D.’s Asphodel

  2023. Maria Trejling. Modernist Cultures 18 (2), 156-180

  Article

  In comparison with other modernist writers, little has been written on the role of animals in H.D.’s works. This article examines the significations – the significances and the signifying – of the peripheral yet reoccurring swallows in her posthumous novel Asphodel, thus exploring their contribution to the meaning of the text. Since most of these swallows signify metaphorically, the widespread skepticism toward metaphor within animal studies is also addressed. Employing a Derridean perspective with a focus on iteration, metaphor, and irreplaceability, the swallows’ significations are analyzed in relation to the themes, style, and imagery of Asphodel, demonstrating how they repeatedly turn the direction of the narrative around, while also providing a pattern for stylistic turns. This not only shows the role of swallows in Asphodel, but also indicates the importance of peripheral animals to modernist literature.

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• Metaforens animaliska rörlighet: Nattfjärilar och djurspråk i Virginia Woolfs The Waves

  2023. Maria Trejling.

  Other

  Read more about Metaforens animaliska rörlighet

• Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene

  2023. Maria Trejling. Green Letters. Studies in Ecocriticism

  Article

  Read more about Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene

• ”Asphodel” överlevde lyckligtvis sin författares önskan om destruktion

  2022. Maria Trejling.

  Other

  Read more about ”Asphodel” överlevde lyckligtvis sin författares önskan om destruktion

• Review of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form by Rachel Murray

  2021. Maria Trejling. Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies 6 (1), 255-258

  Article

  Read more about Review of The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form by Rachel Murray

• A Spectral Dog Wordlessly Speaking Metaphorically in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

  2021. Maria Trejling.

  Conference

  In critical readings of nonhuman beings, there is a widespread concern about the way that metaphorizing animals distances the human (reader) from them. In Lawrence’s works, many of the animals are at once representations of abstract ideas, distant from the textual animal itself, and specific textual beings with a closely depicted embodiedness. Therefore, Lawrence can be useful for thinking about the complex relationships between idea and materiality, tenor and vehicle, metaphor and body. I propose a way to read metaphorical animals as spectral beings: present in their absence. In my paper, I explore this in relation to Tom Brangwen’s dog in an early scene in The Rainbow by considering how the dog conditions and produces its own metaphoricity. I would be interested in discussing textually close questions such as how this is constructed in Lawrence’s text, as well as more distant theoretical questions about how the dog’s metaphoricity relates to power hierarchies and structures of knowledge.

  Read more about A Spectral Dog Wordlessly Speaking Metaphorically in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

Show all publications by Maria Trejling at Stockholm University