“Energy and Literature” course: visit to Tammerkoski plant (13 March) and Utopia lecture on “Sultana’s Dream” (6 March)

Quick update on my spring course on “Energy and Literature”:

Today (13 March), I’ll take my students of the “Energy and Literature” course to visit the Tammerkoski hydroenergy plant (Tammerkoski keskikoski plant). Tampere has a rich industrial history. Located between two lakes, hydroenergy has been a important catalyst of energy transformations in the city, and the plant is still functioning today, in the very centre of the city. Very much looking forward to see local energy infrastructure, and to get a better sense of how historical energy solutions have had their impact on urban culture.

Last week (6 March), we discussed utopian possibilities in the energy humanities, and discussed Sultana’s Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The theoretical reading consisted of Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s 2017 article “Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia: Rokeya S. Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’”, published in Feminist Review. The key concept for the lecture was “utopia”, and the optional reading consisted of my own article on utopian cities, “Cities Utopian, Dystopian and Apocalyptic” (2016).

Please find below the questions for reading discussion I gave the students prior to the class:

What is the relation between human being, energy technology, and landscape  / environment / society in Hussain’s text?

What forms of energy extraction, production, consumption, are described in Hussain’s text? How do they interact with human life and culture?

Consider our earlier definitions of Energy Humanities. Can this text be considered a useful resource within the EH – or not? Why?

How can this literary text be seen as a move towards a better society?

How can a study of this text be seen as a move towards a better society?

The text is – as always – culture-, language- and space-specific. What words in the text show this? What do they mean?

Consider Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s article “futuristic technologies”. What does it add to our understanding of the text?

Within EH, there is a strong sense that energy transition has to mean also societal transitions towards a more just society. How does this fit in with Hussain’s text?

Optional question:

Consider the genre of utopia (see Ameel: ”Cities Utopian…”). To what extent does this text conform to the genre features of utopia? What does an analysis of utopia in the text add to our understanding of it?

“Energy and literature” course – syllabus update

This spring (2023), I’m teaching a course on energy and literature at Tampere University. I’ve finally updated the full course outline and reading list. All thoughts and feedback more than welcome! Full syllabus (pdf) here.

Outline and reading:

9.1 Welcome to the Energy Humanities
16.1 What energy, what humanities?
Reading:
Williams (forthcoming) “Energy Humanities” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory
Drees 2016: “Humans, Humanities and Humanism” Humanism and Technology
23.1 No class – group work
30.1 “Extraction.” First literature review presentation
Reading:
Yaeger 2011: editorial, “Literature in the Ages of…” PMLA  pp. 305-310
Zola 1894: Germinal chapters I-II
6.2 “Stewardship.” Second literature review presentation
Reading:
Leopold 1949: Sand County Almanac pp. 201-226
Sacco 2020: Paying the Land pp. 33-50, 105-108, 263-265
13.2 “Allegory.” Third literature review presentation
Reading:
Aho 1883: “When Father Brough Home the Lamp”
Marx 1964: The Machine in the Garden pp. 169-179.
20.2 No class – group work
27.2 Spring break
6.3. “Utopia” Applied session
Reading:
Hossain 1905: “Sultana’s Dream”
Mookerjea-Leonard 2017: “Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia: Rokeya S. Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’” Feminist Review
Optional reading: Ameel 2016: “Cities Utopian, Dystopian and Apocalyptic”
13.3. “Materiality” Visit to Tammerkoski hydroelectric plant
Optional reading:
Calvino 1974: “The Petrol Pump”
MacDonald 2013: “The resources of Fiction” Reviews in Cultural Theory
20.3 No class – individual work
27.3 “Agency” applied session
Reading/Viewing:
Woman at war / Kona fer í stríð” (2019); opening scene
Marcum: “Visible Legacies of Invisible Resources: Gas Infrastructure, Women, and Environmental Control in 1930s British Documentary Movement Films”
Extinction Rebellion 2021: “Press release”
30.4 Conclusion and open book exam

The course includes research literature sessions and applied sessions, which students prepare in group meetings. The course is structured along six key concepts: “Extraction”, “Stewardship”, “Allegory”, “Utopia”, “Materiality” and “Agency”.

Preparing a Course on Energy and Literature – An Introduction to the Energy Humanities

Currently preparing a course on energy and literature. I will teach the course “Energy and  literature – An Introduction to the Energy Humanities” this spring of 2023 at Tampere University.

I’m obviously looking forward to the course, but also very conscious of my own ongoing learning processes, involving a lot of soul-searching about the possibilities and limitations of literary studies and the humanities: what can we expect to achieve in our fields of studies, what kinds of questions can be answered, what kinds of methods are necessary or possible?

Very much interested in learning more from others, so if you have suggestions for readings, do get in touch at lieven.ameel [a] tuni.fi. I’m particularly looking for relevant sources and texts from the 18th and 19th century. There’s a huge amount of research carried out in contemporary (20th and 21st c) anglophone contexts, but I feel I can learn a lot also from non-English European sources and scholarship (Central European, Eastern European etc.). All suggestions welcome. The dimension of indigenous studies is obviously of particular importance for studies of energy cultures, and I’m looking for more resources on sami perspectives and thoughts on activism in the context of Nordic energy humanities.

I will link to other energy humanities syllabi in my own course material so students can get a sense of how other similar courses have been structured, do feel free to get in touch if you’re working on a similar course or if you have a syllabus you would like to share.

I’ll post the provisional course outline and reading material in a separate post later this month.

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Rig_-_panoramio_(1).jpg

Book Launch: Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies and Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory – 30 September 2022

Today we organize a double book launch at Tampere University to celebrate the recent publication of two new volumes: the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies (Ameel 2022) and the Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (Dawson & Mäkelä 2022).

Very much looking forward to the talk by visiting prof. Cecile Sandten (TU Chemnitz), who has agreed to give a brief assessment of the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies as part of the program.

The book launch also has given me the time to reflect more on what has been achieved with the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, what could have gone differently, and what aspects stand out looking back. I will talk about these elements in more detail today, but I’d look to highlight here three of the 33 brilliant chapters of the volume. I hope these brief highlights will say something also about the aims for the broader volume, and will encourage readers to get to know the companion in its totality.

1. The chapter on the “Medieval Civic Encomium”, subtitled “A Theme and Variations in Praise of Italian Cities”, by Carrie Beneš and Laura Morreale. My own sense is that contemporary literary urban studies could do more to be attentive to historical city writing genres, which is why I was particularly happy to be able to include this exciting chapter on the genre of the civic encomium, a genre with a hugely important afterlife in city writing. What makes this an extra special chapter is that much of the work by the authors here is based on literary texts that are not available in translation, or even available in print, making this a particularly rich contribution. Fascinating is also how the the chapter shows that the genre of the encomium was active beyond literary texts (strictly defined), with a vivid presence in civic festivals and city life.

2. Michael G. Kelly’s chapter “The Form of a City: Geographies of Constraint in
Contemporary Urban Writing from France” presents scholarly work that is fairly close to my own research interests and which probably also for that reason resonated particularly strongly with me from the moment I read the first draft. Kelly’s chapter presents an unusally ambitious – and highly compelling – analysis of the interrelationship between city form and the form of the literary text. It brings figures from the urban margin, as well as lesser-known French authors, to the centre of literary urban studies, all in a study that in its own, balanced and intricate structure, reflects an attentiveness to the how material, societal, and literary form may interact.

3. Elizabeth Ho’s chapter “The Urban Child and Hong Kong’s Public Housing and Public Space in Yeung Hok-Tat’s How Blue Was My Valley“. Hugely attentive to the details of literary analysis as applied to the graphic novel, and with a meticulous grounding of the literary text within the local urban development context and the planning literature, this chapter will be useful to literary urban studies scholars and students alike. Also a text that puts the experiences of the child front and center. The evocative images from Hok-Tat’s graphic novel are an integral part of the compelling argumentative progression in this chapter.

Abstracts and book launch details below:

Lieven Ameel (ed.): The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. August 2022

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban studies consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature. The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature.

Paul Dawson & Maria Mäkelä (eds.): Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. July 2022.  

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top 44 scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The 40 chapters of the volume explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality, challenge normative modes of storytelling, and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship. 

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory - 1st Edition - Paul Daws

Time: Friday, September 30 at 14:00–16:30  // Place: Café Aula & Toivo, Main Building 2nd floor, City Centre Campus 

Sparkling wine, coffee/tea and snack served. The program will consist of short introductory talks, online video greetings from our international collaborators and contributors, and a guest commentary by visiting Erasmus professor Cecile Sandten.  

The book launch is also the first event of the science event series of the Faculty of Social Science, Tampere University.  

Out Now: The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

After years in the making, this book is finally out in the world: The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. Its aims are to provide the reader with a methodical overview of the fundamentals of literary urban studies, and with a detailed outline of new directions in the study of the literary city.

It’s been a privilege to work on this with so many committed and wonderful colleagues. This is a book that showcases the richness and vitality of literary urban studies, with chapters on subjects ranging from urban satire in ancient Rome (by Grace Gillies), to the metropolitan miniature (by Andreas Huyssen), Athens in post-crisis literature (Riikka P. Pulkkinen), Hong Kong’s public housing in the graphic novel (Elizabeth Ho), translocality in city literature (Lena Mattheis), and much more.

From the Introduction: “What does it mean […] for a literary text to take the city as its focal point, as the presence from which character, language, plot, and voice take part of their meaning? How does the citiness of city literature make that literature – and literary urban studies – different from other texts and scholarly approaches? To what extent does the raw material constituted by the urban realm demand other kinds of approaches, as opposed to other kinds of literary texts? In each of the chapters of this Companion, these questions are present at least as part of a general background that informs the analysis.” (p. 2)

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban studies consists of 33 newly commissioned chapters that provide an outline of contemporary literary urban studies. The Companion covers all of the main theoretical approaches as well as key literary genres, with case studies covering a range of different geographical, cultural, and historical settings. The final chapters provide a window into new debates in the field. The three focal issues are key concepts and genres of literary urban studies; a reassessment and critique of classical urban studies theories and the canon of literary capitals; and methods for the analysis of cities in literature.

The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to the city in literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on city literature.

From the Acknowledgements:

“I am grateful to all of the contributors to this volume for taking up the challenge to contribute a chapter within a tight time frame and under difficult circumstances. I am particularly indebted to all contributors whom I did not know prior to the work on this Companion and who reacted warmly and collegially to my invitation. […]

I would also like to thank all colleagues with whom I have been in touch in the planning stages of the Companion, and who were not able to contribute for a variety of reasons. Circumstances for academic work have been particularly difficult these past years, with an unrelenting global pandemic (as I write these words) causing a continued state of uncertainty. In several countries – my own home country included – political decisions have made working conditions at universities more difficult during the past decade, especially within the humanities. Colleagues with whom I communicated in the context of this Companion wrote that they were coping with bereavement, were struggling under the simultaneous pressures of online teaching and home schooling, or were so overwhelmed with teaching in precarious positions that they had no possibility to do research or writing. I think it is important to also note, in an acknowledgment section such as this one, the wide-ranging invisible work and the meaningful absences in the background of academic publishing.

A special thanks to Frida, who was born during the final stages of this book project, and who always brought a sense of perspective and a smile to working from home. This book is dedicated to her.” (xiv-xv)

From the Introduction: “literary urban studies as a field can be said to resemble the city itself: it is a space where people from all kinds of backgrounds and with a range of different aims and perspectives meet and interact. And it is never finished – there are always some structures to be refurbished or adapted, some fallow land to be repurposed, and new kinds of methodologies, approaches, and experiences to be incorporated, always in ways that build on what is already there. In both of these senses, this Companion hopes to resemble its object of study.” (p. 8)

Do get in touch (at lieven.ameel [a] tuni.fi) if you are interested in reviewing the book, if you would like to read a particular chapter or chapters, or if you want to discuss literary urban studies.

Fennia Reflections: New directions for narrative approaches to urban planning

The latest issue of the geography journal Fennia features a book review forum that focuses on my latest book, The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (Routledge 2020). In the forum, Robert Beauregard and Mark Tewdwr-Jones each wrote a review of my book, contextualizing its contribution to the field and proposing further directions. As part of the book review forum, I wrote my own reflection on the reviews. Beauregard and Tewdwr-Jones are two eminent urban studies scholars whose work has long been an inspiration for my own research, and it was an honor to engage in such a rich dialogue within the forum provided by Fennia.

I would like to thank the team of Fennia, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio, Jouni Häkli, and in particular, the reflection editor James Riding, for their work in providing this exciting dialogic space.

From the issue’s introduction:

“In the first book review forum published in Fennia, as part of a new initiative, Lieven Ameel’s (2021) The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning: Plotting the Helsinki Waterfront, is the book that provides the starting point for dialogue. In two extended case studies from the planning of the Helsinki waterfront, the book applies narrative concepts and theories to a broad range of texts and practices involved in urban planning. Robert Beauregard (2021) kicks off the forum by adding a material perspective that treats planning documents as actors in planning practice. The vibrant matter of these hidden texts also weaves narratives, as planners produce documents before they tell the public stories. […] Tewdwr-Jones (2021) emphasizes also […] wider democratic and polarizing issues. These issues cannot be separated from narratives of place shaping, planning, and urban growth and decline. In response, Ameel (2021) addresses the material aspects of planning practices that take place in increasingly digitalized environments, and storytelling to which the public is not invited, attending to narratives developed by planners in their cloistered world, opening the forum to potential future research.” (Kallio, Häkli & Riding)

All articles are published open access:

Robert Beauregard’s article “The stories that documents tell”: https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/115188

Mark Tewdwr-Jones’s article “Narratives of and in urban change and planning: whose narratives and how authentic?”: https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/115636

My reflection piece “New directions for narrative approaches to urban planning”: https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/117123

Out now: Narrative Forms of Adaptation, Retreat, and Mitigation in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You

My most recent article “Narrative Forms of Adaptation, Retreat, and Mitigation in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You” has just been published by Poetics Today 43:1, pp. 127-147. Link here.

Abstract:

This article examines narrative engagement with strange weather and rising waters in Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). It applies three terms from climate policy — adaptation, retreat, and mitigation — as heuristic concepts to approach the formal responses in the novel to a catastrophic event, Hurricane Sandy, while also considering the broader implications for the interplay between narrative form and radical climate change. The focus is on narrative forms such as catalogs, gaps in language and in the storyworld, and plotted instances of compassion. By drawing from environmental policy terms, this article suggests an analogy between how literary fiction functions and how human populations are described as behaving in the language of policy. Literature is adapting in formal terms to a changing climate; it is retreating from the effects of climate disruption, by way of a diluted language; and it is trying to find ways to soften and mitigate those effects — with mitigation approached in its first, now largely obsolete meaning of the word, as compassion. Exploring such analogies, this article emphasizes literary form’s participation in a broader discursive and material meshwork of human relationships with the transforming environment, in dialogue with science and policy
communications.

Excerpt:

“Of course, literary form — seen here, following Caroline Levine (2015: 13), as literary “patterns of repetition and difference,” from meter to novelistic plot — does not adapt and retreat in the way coastal communities change their living habits or move to higher ground in the face of radical climate change. And literary form cannot mitigate climate change in the way we can by switching to renewable energy or a more sustainable diet. And yet literary form can display adaptation of existing language and narrative strategies, such as the list, in its responses to climate change, and, as will be explored below, it can even exhibit a marked sense of retreat on the part of language in the way threatening futures are imagined.
In media and policy texts, adaptation, retreat, and mitigation tend to be seen in terms of financial costs and possible risks, visualized in flood maps, graphs, and quantitative measurements. Examples from media and policy include the IPCC’s (2018) use of the term carbon budget or Citigroup’s 2015 report on the economic cost of global warming (Citigroup), or again the warning, in media, that rising waters would cost “trillions of dollars” (Abraham 2018). A novel such as Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow
mimics — and satirizes — such language used in finance and insurance (see also Bergthaller 2018: 117). What unnerves people and institutions, in Rich’s novel, are not the material conditions or the real effects of catastrophe on lives, communities, and civilization but, rather, the figures and numbers that denote risk in financial terms — financial settlements based on insurance policies. Such a position mirrors real-life responses to radical climate change: a recent study focusing on the aftermath of Sandy in New York concluded that for inhabitants of at-risk shores, the flood map — an abstraction visualizing future risk — was perceived as “scarier than another storm” (Elliott 2018: 1068). In Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You (2014: 49), it is not the specter of a future storm that drives people from their homes, but the prospect of “the new flood maps issued by fuckin’ Obama’s lackeys.”
If the current crisis is a “crisis of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016), it is notable that, in the case of Odds against Tomorrow, fictional language turns to technical, financial, legal, and insurance discourses for models to bring the reader nearer to the future. This appropriation of financial language can be seen as a mode for critiquing such language, but also as an inflection of the novelistic voice by financial and utilitarian discourses that naturalize and normalize highly problematic modes of framing radical climate change in terms of its monetized costs. But other forms of adaptation are possible — including modulations of narrative form that gesture toward chaos and contingency, and toward an inability to assign coherent meaning (let alone to ascribe quantifiable measurings) to chaotic events. Let Me Be Frank with You explores some of these possibilities.”

(pp. 133-134)

From the conclusion:

“Forms, as Levine (2015: 5) reminds us, “matter . . . , because they shape
what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context.” The partial
breakdown of language and narrative form can act as a reminder of the
limits to our vocabulary and cognitive capacities when faced with the sca-
lar complexities of multiple uncertain futures, and with future losses visi-
ble in our present language. And while, for the characters within the sto-
ryworld, brief moments of compassion are arguably outside the political,
this doesn’t have to be true for the effect on the reader, for whom instances
of emplotted compassion may provide a powerful sense of shared human-
ity across temporal or spatial boundaries, as well as an articulation of the
unspoken loss and grief that have become one of the dominants in thinking
of uncertain ecological and climatic futures.”

(p. 144)

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Jason Finch for inviting me to Åbo Akademi University to present a version of this article and everyone present at the seminar for their comments. Thanks to everyone at the “Wavescapes” conference in Split/Vis, Srećko Jurišić in particular, for
valuable feedback to an early draft of this article. Thanks are also due to Pieter Vermeulen and Jouni Teittinen for comments at various stages, and to Markku Lehtimäki and Adeline Johns- Putra for extensive and insightful feedback. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and outside reviewers of Poetics Today for their thoughtful engagement with my article.

Nostalgia and world literature

I participated today in the yearly autumn seminar at Tampere University; the seminar is structured this year around the notion of nostalgia.

The seminar includes a range of speakers on the subject of nostalgia in literature, including Riikka Rossi, Maria Matinmikko, and Mikko Mäntyniemi – full program can be found here.

I presented an (admittedly tentative) talk about nostalgia and world literature.

Many thanks to Nazry Bahrawi, Liz Ho, Chen Bar-Itzhak, Francesco Marilungo, Cengiz Buket, Tim Hannigan, Annie Webster, and others, who have drawn my attention over the past years to the many aspects of nostalgia in literature beyond Europe.

 

Invited lecture at Rutgers, 20 October 2021

I’m honored to present a guest lecture at Rutgers University today, on the topic of “Literary Urban Studies: Comparative Perspectives on Future Cities across Genres”. I will start out with a tentative introduction into the field of literary urban studies, with the second part of my lecture a comparative approach to future cities, by way of a reading of three texts (Odds Against Tomorrow, De Ondergang van Amsterdam, and Solaris korrigert).

One of the aims of the talk is also to give an update on my research project on cities at the water.

Source: https://newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/

Many thanks to prof. Weijie Song – an expert, among others, on the literature of Bejing – for the generous invitation! I hope I have the opportunity to visit Rutgers in person in the not too distant future…