【活動轉貼】Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden

講題：Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden

講者：Jessica J. Lee（李潔珂）｜Course Director and Panel Tutor, Creative Writing-Nonfiction, University of Cambridge｜Course Instructor, Orion Creative Writing Workshops｜Course Director, Granta Nature Writing Workshop｜《山與林的深處》（2024）作者

主持：周序樺｜中央研究院歐美研究所副研究員

時間：2024年9月12日（四）14:00

地點：中央研究院歐美所一樓會議室｜視訊與實體並行

主題簡介

In this talk I’ll present my second book, Two Trees Make a Forest, which was published in 2019. Taking formal inspiration from novels The Stolen Bicycle (by Wu Ming-Yi) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (by Madeleine Thien), Two Trees Make a Forest engages critically with the notion of memoir in the English-language nature writing genre: through an examination of the fragmentary stories of my grandparents’ lives, alongside the history of Taiwan itself, it asks how the genre can be expanded beyond the scope of Anglo-American landscapes without reifying an orientalist gaze. I’ll read briefly from the book before discussing its origins and formal and genre-specific challenges.

Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden: In this presentation, I’ll consider the ways gardens have been centred in three works of very recent contemporary nature writing: Unearthing by Kyo Maclear, Rootbound by Alice Vincent, and Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell. In each of these books, the story of the garden is complicated and far from idyllic, whether as a framework for understanding kindship and relation, a means for understanding individual coming-of-age against the background of urban life, or as a means for exploring the legacies of migration and empire. In each of these works, the garden is a way of leaning more closely into the world. I’ll consider the ways literary nature writing can provide a means for narrating one’s experience of more-than-human kinship and connection, and ultimately provide a complex re-imagining of tropes of the garden as escape or salve.

講者簡介

李潔珂 (Jessica J. Lee)，作家、環境歷史學家，英國國王學院學士學位、倫敦大學碩士學位，加拿大約克大學環境史及環境美學博士。曾獲2019年RBC Taylor Prize潛力作家獎。著有《轉身：一部游泳回憶錄》(Turning: A Swimming Memoir)，《山與林的深處：一位臺裔環境歷史學家的尋鄉之旅，在臺灣的植物、島嶼風光和歷史間探尋家族與自身的來處與記憶》(Two Trees Make a Forest) 是她的第二部著作，最新出版著作Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging (Catapult, 2024)。

報名連結：Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden

原訊來源：中研院歐美所種種看