CALL FOR PAPERS

New Nature Writing/Nouvelles écritures de la nature

SEAC International Conference

Nantes Université

14-15 octobre 2027

organized by Emilie Walezak

Guest speaker : Timothy Baker, University of Aberdeen

Popularized in the UK by the 2007 publication of a special issue by Granta Magazine, the same year as Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places, the expression ‘new nature writing’ covers a wide range of non-fictional texts whose implicit comparison to a past tradition delineates the onto-epistemological stakes of a shift in knowledge production and lived experience. While romantic wanderers such as Wordsworth – who was instrumental in the eventual creation of the Lake district national park – were still imbued with the notion of human exceptionalism pitted against the exceptional grandeur of nature, nature writers today are rather attuned to humbly situating themselves within complex and discrete meshes of interdependences. In the ‘Editor’s Letter’ introducing Granta’s special issue, Jason Cowley proposes two US examples to distinguish between the persistence of an ‘old’ tradition and the novelty he descries in contemporary writing. He thus contrasts Christopher Johnson McCandless with Barry Lopez. The first emblematizes the ‘romantic adventurer’ using ‘wilderness [as] a screen on to which […] to project his longings and needs’. His real-life figure was the inspiration of the 1996 non-fiction book by John Krakauer, Into the Wild, turned into a film by Sean Penn in 2007. Cowley sees biologist Barry Lopez’s 1986 Arctic Dream, winner of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, as different from the romantic tradition in his ‘struggle for exactitude: the struggle to find a language, free from cliché, in which to describe and explain, in all its complicated particularity a landscape undergoing irrevocable change’. While the US tradition of nature writing is widely known, through the works of the Transcendentalists in particular, this conference will focus on the UK tradition and its current reinterpretations. Testifying to this UK specificity, the Wainwright Prize, a nature writing prize established in 2013, was named after fellwalker and guidebook writer, Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991). Of note is also the connection of the genre with outdoor physical activity such as hiking, or wild swimming as in Roger Deakin’s influential 1999 Waterlog which was also read as a political tract for the right to roam. Such physical activities could be approximated to Tim Ingold’s ‘ambulatory knowing’ (2000, 231). Turning such activities into writing furthers the embodied knowledge implied in experiencing nature and experimenting with form.

Featuring writings by Kathleen Jamie, Seamus Heaney, Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey, or Philipp Marsden, the purpose of Granta’s issue, outlined in the ‘Editor’s Letter’, was to commission ‘writers who approached their subject in heterodox and experimental ways’. Jason Cowley stressed that they ‘wanted the contributions to be voice-driven, narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the story, if sometimes only bashfully’. He also added that ‘the best new nature writing is also an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue […] something urgent, vital, and alert to the defining particulars of our time’ (10). This statement may usefully serve as an outline of the genre’s formal characteristics: new nature writing, then, is a non-fictional, personal response to the extinction crisis and climate change via a dialogue established with the methods of the life sciences. 

New nature writing aligns with the recent interest in a ‘revitalized natural history’, broached from a decolonial and ecofeminist perspective, advanced by Anna Tsing in the 2024 Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. The criticism of a larger intersectional system of domination and exploitation of nature, outlining the privileged perspective of humans, men, and western imperialists, expounded by decolonial and ecofeminist theories, contributed to the ‘new’ approaches to nature in writing. The establishment in 2019 of the Nan Shepherd prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing attests to this inflection in the outline of the genre. In The Living Mountain, published in 1977 but written in the 1940s, the Scottish mountaineer writer insists on the sensory experience of the thinking body (p.). The experiments with form, carried out, for instance, in the latest works of Kathleen Jamie, Cairn (2024) or Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Twelve Words for Moss (2024), follow in the footsteps of Shepherd and constitute attempts at relaying a new understanding and experience of the organic world as interdependent based on an immanent immersion in the milieu. In that sense, they are essays which Isabelle Stengers, playing with the French word essayer/trying, characterizes as giving an initial observation ‘the power to make us think, feel, imagine, and act’ (27). The texts thus repurpose field observations as ‘arts of noticing’ (Tsing, 5). They may also be described as ‘critical memoirs’ (15), or autotheoretical texts defined by Lauren Fournier as ‘performative life-thinking’ (14). Elizabeth-Jane Burnett subtitled her 2019 The Grassling. A Geological Memoir. The subtitle encapsulates the stakes of connecting the scales of the personal – her own mourning process – and of the planetary – solastalgia (Albrecht) for the extent and speed of the loss of habitats and species. In addition to the hybridizing of memoir, autobiography, and autotheory, the use of the first-person also invites reflections on diary writing and confessions while the grieving process, coupled with nature writing, calls for a revaluation of the pastoral elegy. Timothy Baker has described this fragmentary form as ‘gleanings’ referring to Agnès Varda’s 2000 documentary film and outlining how, in addition to the emphasis the notion lays on discarded material and the borderline of legality, ‘the idea of gleaning […] foregrounds ideas of immanence and encounter, and the way that rather than stipulating a pre-existing relation between subject and object it emphasizes the co-constitution of humans and the natural environment’ (29). 

Like the right to roam, gleaning brings forth the question of the commons, which parallels the exploration of the relationship between the individual voice and collective engagement. The question of who gets the right to be represented is crucial in the visual arts with contemporary artists reinterpreting the traditions of landscape painting and portraiture, the two genres that, to Philippe Descola, exemplify the “naturalist ontology”. Ingrid Pollard’s series from 1987 entitled Pastoral Interlude purposefully situates itself in relation with the romantic tradition (by diverting a quote from Wordsworth) in order to visibilize Black presence in a typified British landscape. The conference will welcome contributions on the visual arts which question environmental and cultural embeddedness vis-à-vis the iconic fixity of the British landscape. The political question of the UK identity animated the debates in the early/mid twentieth century around insularity and rurality within the context of the decline of the empire, which contributed to perpetuate a conservative idyllic view of the countryside, analysed in 1973 in the seminal The Country and the City by Raymond Williams. The conference invites contributions on the period which question the role of literature in the politics and aesthetics of the pastoral and the counter-pastoral, whose relevance has been rekindled on the occasion of the Brexit.

The voice-driven texts of new nature writing furthermore challenge and repurpose the supposed objectivity of study protocols in the natural sciences by exemplifying situated knowledges as ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connection called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology’ (Haraway, 584). Such perspective allows to account for the emphasis laid on place in what is sometimes called landscape writing but also on the writing experiments carried out in contrast or parallel with experimental sciences. Politicizing the embodied experience of vulnerability shared with other species goes hand in hand with entering into an epistemological conversation with the Western anthropocentric conception and preconceptions of the life sciences, their legacy, but also the current transformations effected by technology-driven science. The overbearing dominance of big data, modelings and satellite imagery, exemplifies a reductionist world view, expounded by the advocates of technosolutionism. By contrast with the techno-sciences, anthropologists and philosophers have turned their attention to amateur practices. In his exploration of knowing as travelling, Tim Ingold uses the work of David Turnbull to explain the bifurcation of knowledge into science and cultures with cultures appearing to be ‘in place’ while science is ‘in space’ (2011, 155), which served to legitimize ‘official science’ as vertical and to discredit traditional knowledges. He calls on practices like drawing to reconcile knowledges as integrated. In Living as a Bird (2021), Vinciane Despret also contrasts models with practices, more particularly those of amateur ornithology. Amateur practices emphasize love of and care for one’s subject of study as a primary motive for the pursuit of knowledge, echoing the personal dimension characteristic of the genre. They are further echoed by the numerous citizen science surveys implemented by conservation organisations like the Bugs Matter initiative launched in the UK in 2021 by Buglife. As outlined by Jos Smith in a further attempt to define the genre, the meshwork of science and literature encourages to reconsider knowledge: ‘At the heart of the genre, most critics celebrate the distinctive entanglement of the scientific and the personal voice; a foundation of authoritative knowledge and then something more speculative and poetic, stretching and complicating the scientific in inviting ways’ (268).

The poetic is emblematized not only by the actual inclusion of poems in new nature writings but also by the career path of the writers themselves as many of them started their writing career as poets. It allows to connect the genre with ecopoetry. The personal dimension in writing can thus also read as a variation on the lyrical subject which becomes decentered in order to make other voices heard. This emphasizes more particularly the ontological stakes of speaking for – outlining the political stakes of legal representation – or speaking as – sketching out the ethical implications of empathy. It raises the current debated issue of the distinction between anthropomorphism as enabling to descry affinities beyond difference and anthropocentrism. New nature writing texts can also be read along the lines of Anne Simon’s zoopoetics as she explains that ‘the challenge will be to explore the different linguistic and existential values of “as/like” and to insist that poetic language supports, even institutes, quasi non-human immersions in the living world’ (my translation, 117). Thus, while the main focus of the conference will be to consider the specific innovations in non-fictional texts, proposals on ecopoetics, including, in a broader sense, the eco/zoopoetics implemented in fictional texts whose focus is the representation of nature are also invited. 

Finally, the topic raises timely questions about academic writing itself as the non-fictional aspect of the texts in combination with their recourse to research closely resembles what is called research-creation. The conference will welcome creative contributions that seek to implement ‘new grammars’ (Citton, 10, my translation) in scholarly practices prompted by the need to face what is to come.

The conference welcomes submissions on UK writing in a variety of formats, including creative proposals either in the form of individual submissions or in the form of workshop proposals, that revolve around, but are not limited to, the following concepts and themes:

  • The epistemological conversation between literature and scientific observations, models and protocols, and the matter of scales
  • Experimental writing and situated knowledges, the repurposing of scientific objectivity and the rehabilitation of traditional knowledges and amateur practices
  • The embodied experience of milieux represented through the physical activities of hiking, swimming, mountaineering and others
  • The historical dimension of the genre and its connection to conservationist policies, calling forth the definition of the word ‘nature’ itself
  • The political conversation with collective usages and ways of inhabiting, walking, knowing the land, which is usually referred to today as the commons, and which echoes the specificities of UK history and the enclosures
  • New nature writing and grief: solastalgia and the 6th mass extinction in dialogue with the elegy, threnody, and the pastoral
  • The politics of vulnerability and care and their poetic translation
  • Ecopoetry and the ontological stakes of giving a voice to the other-than-humans, the tension between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism

This conference will be convened by Emilie Walezak at le château du Tertre, Nantes Université on October 14th and 15th, 2027.

Proposals of 300 words, together with a short biographical note, should be sent to Emilie Walezak at emiliewalezak@yahoo.fr by April 2nd, 2027. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by April 26th, 2027.

A selection of peer-reviewed papers will be published in the SEAC’s journal Études britanniques contemporaines: https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/

Bibliography

Baker, Timothy. New Forms of Environmental Writing. Gleaning and Fragmentation, Bloomsbury, 2023.

Citton, Yves. « Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de recherche-création », postface à Erin Manning et Brian Massumi, Pensée en acte : vingt propositions pour la recherche-création, trad. Armelle Chrétien, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2018, pp. 95-125.

Cowley, Jason. “Editor’s Letter,” The New Nature Writing, Granta 102, 2007, pp. .

Descola, Philippe. Les formes du visible. Une anthropologie de la figuration, Seuil, 2021.

Despret, Vinciane. Living as a Bird, trans. Helen Morrison, Polity Press, 2021.

Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, MIT Press, 2022.

Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14:3, 1988: pp. 575-599.

Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, 2000.

—. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Routledge, 2011.

Simon, Anne. Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique, Wild Project, 2021.

Smith, Jos. “The New Nature Writing”, Ecozon@ 11:2, 2020, pp. 267-272.

Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey, Open Humanities Press, 2015.

Tsing, Anna et al. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. The New Nature, Stanford University Press, 2024.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City, Chatto & Windus, 1973.