Kaisa Kortekallio

This essay introduces recent speculative novels written by Finnish authors, and discusses the vegetal agency that permeates them. In Johanna Sinisalo's The Core of the Sun and Emmi Itäranta's The Moonday Letters, plant life entices, intoxicates, and transforms human bodies and minds. Sinisalo experiments with ideas about the coevolution of plants and humans, and Itäranta explores the significance of plants in the contexts of space colonies and ecosabotage. The essay suggests that the novels gesture toward an emerging Planthroposcene. Anthropologist Natasha Myers has proposed "Planthroposcene" as a modification to Anthropocene, the era of global human impact on the Earth. As an "aspirational episteme", the

Drawing on feminist, enactivist and posthumanist theories of reading, the essay develops theoretical and methodological tools for bodily and reflective reading of fictional figures. It introduces the notion of “readerly choreography,” which stands for the iterative experiential patterns that fictional narratives suggest. The primary purpose of the notion is to provide a better grasp of readerly dynamics typical to genre-derived works of fiction — including the cases in which generic frames of expectation and experience are estranged and reconfigured. The essay’s contribution to theory is presented on the basis of a reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004). This short story plays on the conventions of action-adventure, exaggerating the toughness and physical capabilities of technologically enhanced, posthuman action heroes. Owing to this exaggeration, it becomes difficult for readers to continue to perform the habitual experiential patterns of excitement, action-derived pleasure, and identification with the heroic protagonist. In other words, “The People of Sand and Slag” estranges the readerly choreography of action-adventure narratives.

Ympäristömuutos haastaa kirjallisuudentutkimuksen merkitysperustaa. Kaisa Kortekallion artikkeli esittelee ympäristömuutosta haasteena ekokritiikin, antroposeenin, posthumanismin ja postkolonialismin sekä kirjallisuuden käytäntöjen näkökulmista. Erityisesti Kortekallio pohtii sitä, kuinka ympäristömuutoksen kirjallisuus haastaa moderneille kertomuksille tyypillisen keskushahmon eli antropoksen asemaa. Hän tulkitsee Antti Salmisen kokeellisia teoksia Lomonosovin moottori (2014) ja MIR (2019) ympäristömuutoksen kirjallisuutena, jossa antropoksen varmuutta murennetaan ei-inhimillisillä elementeillä ja kerronnallisilla keinoilla.

Viite:

Kortekallio, Kaisa 2022. Lahoava antropos Antti Salmisen Lomonosovin moottorissa ja MIRissä. Teoksessa Ympäristömuutos ja estetiikka, toim. Jukka Mikkonen, Sanna Lehtinen, Kaisa Kortekallio ja Noora-Helena Korpelainen. Helsinki: Suomen Estetiikan Seura, 354 - 391.

Koko teos (open access): https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/343564

This chapter considers the affective experience of reading Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl during seasonal depression. The approach draws on Matthew Ratcliffe's account of mood as well as enactive and New Materialist perspectives, bringing together the material forces of weather, human embodiment, and literature. The chapter demonstrates how descriptive and narrative techniques, such as kinaesthetic and spatial language, generate bodily feelings of tension, weight, and constraint, amplifying the experiential patterns of seasonal mood. This intentionally affective argument develops a nuanced sense of the material dynamics of bodily reading.

Arkikokemus ei helposti saa kiinni kaukana sulavista jäätiköistä tai kapitalistisista tuotantoketjuista päivittäisten appelsiiniemme takana. Antroposeenikeskustelussa kuuluu usein väitettävän, että tällaiset ilmiöt ovat ruumiillisen kokemuksen "tuolla puolen", liian suuria, hitaita, hajaantuneita tai kaukaisia. Mutta entä jos kokemuksen heikkous onkin vain yrityksen puutetta? Entä jos oleellinen kysymys ei olekaan "mitä kokemukselle tapahtuu" vaan "mitä kokemukselle voidaan tehdä"? Spekulatiivinen fiktio, vaikkapa Paolo Bacigalupin The Windup Girl, voi auttaa tekemään kokemuksesta oudompaa ja siten auttaa pääsemään kiinni antroposeenin ilmiöihin.

This chapter, “Becoming-instrument: Thinking with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects”, considers first-person narration and empathic enactment of fictional experience from posthumanist and enactivist perspectives. It introduces a new methodological device called “becoming-instrument”, which opens the reader’s experience to nonhuman influences. Building on Marco Caracciolo’s (2014) claims about empathic engagement with first-person narratives and Merja Polvinen’s (2012) notion of self-aware readerly engagement, the chapter’s author Kaisa Kortekallio argues that engagement with estranging first-person narratives, such as Annihilation and Hyperobjects, can work toward dissolving the certainty of the human subject and develop in its stead a model of subjectivity as “multiple and always-in-progress” (Sherryl Vint 2005).

Annihilation (2014) and Hyperobjects (2013) both invite the reader to enact the affective experientiality of their first-person narrators, but they also foreground the fictionality of those narrators. The chapter argues that affective experientiality and awareness of fictionality can intertwine in the readerly experience, and that the combination of affectivity and self-referentiality is characteristic of the “dark” or “weird” ecology VanderMeer and Morton advance in their texts. Finally, Kortekallio suggests that the dynamic of enactment applies not only to explicitly fictional narrative techniques but also to the rhetorical devices employed in non-fiction texts – such as the rhetorical “I” in Hyperobjects.

This article analyzes two novels by the British writer Simon Ings, Hot Head (1992) and Hotwire (1995), from perspectives provided by second-order systems theory, philosophy of neuroscience and posthumanist philosophy. In Ings' cyberpunk fiction, the use of a particular novum, a programmable cerebral tissue called “datafat”, enables elaborate experimentation on different theories of mind and matter. Due to this experimentation, Ings’ work is able to convey a conception of cognition as an emergent effect produced in material processes that are both human and non-human. Ings’ work asserts the human subject as a complex system in a complex technological ecology and, consequentially, presents us with a model for subjectivity that might be called “posthuman”.