Listening to the Environment: Alice Oswald’s D(eco)nstruction

Monika Szuba and Julian Wolfreys

FULL TEXT

ABSTRACT (en)

In this article, the authors pay strict attention to the minimal, the small, the barely there in Alice Oswald. Arguing that hers is an inclusive response to the environment, in which everything flows into everything else and the human being part of this flow, enfolded by the world he or she hears and sees, the authors focus on the small, the local, the barely heard, and ultimately the idea and presence of the stone as measures of how Oswald hears her environment, how this listening connects the local to the global, and how such poetic practice overcomes, or presents at least the possibility of overcoming, the anthropocentric superiority and distance that determines much thinking of the environment in conventional discourses.

KEYWORDS (en)

ecology, phenomenology, stones, water, silence, listening, locality

DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.66.8

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