Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film ed. by Hande Gurses and Irmak Ertuna Howison (review)

Ecocriticism has unmistakably established itself as one of the most urgent and necessary ways of studying art and literature. The field is rife with theoretical models that challenge the central position assigned to humans in Western art and philosophy. These accounts disturb the anthropomorphic dynamics of representation, propose new models for analyzing the ethical dimensions of the encounters between self and other (including and especially the non-human other), and suggest more dispersed modes of emotional agency through the study of affects, trauma, and materiality.

Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, edited by Hande Gurses and Irmak Ertuna Howison, is a timely and impressive compendium of contemporary scholarship on Turkish film and literature as well as a theoretical tour de force that offers a variety of compelling models for developing ecocritical approaches to textual and visual analysis. This edited volume is not only a welcome addition to existing ecocritical approaches but also a landmark account that demonstrates how various theoretical models need to be reconsidered when ecocriticism originates from local contexts and the periphery.

One of the most important accomplishments of this volume is the intricacy with which each contribution announces new and exciting intersections between different theoretical frameworks. This is especially true for the two articles that investigate works by Bilge Karasu and Sema Kaygusuz. The first, by Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim, is an attempt at "rethinking the subject" by creating powerful and persuasive intersections between theories of affect, corporeality, vulnerability, and trauma whereby the subject can be situated "in a space of enmeshment where matter, object, and non-human animal are responsive to each other's concerns." Likewise, the second article, co-authored by Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu and Ezgi Hamzaçebi, seeks those literary encounters which bring an end to "autonomous interiority" and occasion "the mutually and continuously multiplying transformation of self and other."

The strength of these two accounts owes partially to the generative correspondences the authors manage to create between literary and critical description. Just as the texts analyzed here perform processes of interdependency and entanglement, the theoretical apparatus also performs the relentless work of unsettling critical boundaries. As a result, the notions of ethical engagement explored in these articles model crucial ways in which ecocritical approaches may change the texture of reader-response and literary criticism.

Editors Gurses and Howison announce that this volume witnesses "the formation of an ecocritical canon in Turkish literature." Indeed, the contributions to this volume analyze works of film and literature from a variety of genres and periods. In addition to observing how an ecological awareness helps particular authors and filmmakers generate new stylistic or rhetorical patterns, they also provide insights into how these works might be situated historically by analyzing changes in manners of representation across the history of film and literature. This is one of the most important achievements of this volume because it offers strong specimens and models for research and teaching in relevant fields.

The editors also emphasize the importance of "focusing on particular local contexts" so that this way "the study of world literature can decentralize the Anglo-American-based ecocriticism and put universalist assumptions into relief." It is quite ironic, of course, that the field of ecocriticism would integrate the periphery so belatedly into its discussions, and this volume promises to rectify this situation by announcing the urgency of making ecocriticism an indispensable approach within the other dominant field of inquiry called "world literature."

Most convincing accounts that fulfill this ambition thus derive their theoretical backbones from analyses rooted in the particular historical dynamics of modern Turkey. For instance, though E. Khayyat's "Dogs of Modernity" turns to Jacques Derrida as a final gesture to reconceptualize the human-animal interaction, the article takes its strength from its rigorous and incisive engagement with the history of the late Ottoman Empire...