Description:

The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop presents:

Topology and the Topos: Situated Poetics in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta

A brown bag lunch workshop featuring the work of English department grad student Jayme Collins.

Please RSVP to Adam Syvertsen to receive pre-event materials: adamsyvertsen2025@u.northwestern.edu

"The excerpt I will circulate comes from the first chapter of my dissertation. As a whole, my dissertation, titled Composing in the Field: Situated Poetries and Environments, 1945-2018, takes up a variety of complex situated poems from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s expansive poem-garden Little Sparta (est. 1966) to Jen Bervin’s intricate Silk Poems (2017) to argue that the place, means, and medium of poetry’s composition generates its poetics. The chapter to be circulated focuses on Scottish poet-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, taking seriously the genre confusions that lie at the heart of the work – is it poem or garden? – to foreground the structural relationship between material, site, and text in Finlay’s work. I suggest that by staging poetic tropes as objects in the garden, and then as places in the garden, and then as situations in the garden, and then finally as (theatrical) military tactics, Finlay makes an anti-nativist environmental claim that is surprising given the boundedness of his garden: place is not a place but rather a series of topoi, poetic tropes that produce place. By recasting the material contexts of language, I suggest, Finlay argues by formal means for an alternative environmental ethics: one not of preservation or of conservation but instead of 'responsible making.'"

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities fosters a community of scholars at Northwestern and in the Chicago area who are interested in what we have broadly termed the environmental humanities. Workshop participants share an interest in questions of nature, science, ethics, aesthetics, environmental policy, and the shifting relationships between the human and the non-human, as well as in refining our understanding of what “the environmental humanities” comprises. The Environmental Humanities Research Workshop hosts informal discussions about provocative pieces of scholarship as well as works-in-progress, and organizes public talks by established scholars whose work has helped define and expand humanistic approaches to environmental issues.

To join the Environmental Humanities listserv, please email:
Corey Byrnes (corey.byrnes@northwestern.edu) or Keith Woodhouse (keith.woodhouse@northwestern.edu).