56吃瓜网

IAS faculty member Jennifer Atkinson presented at the t (ASLE). Her talk, "The Poetics of Dirt," explored the role of garden writing in unsettling the privileged status of vision — and reduction of nature to an optical artifact — in 19th century U.S. nature writing. The paper also examined the ethical implications of everyday, embodied aspects of garden-based literature and arts, which highlight sense experiences we share with other forms of life. In facilitating felt and imagined connections (what phenomenologists call “vital sympathies”) that are a precondition for extending moral consideration beyond our own selves and species, the genre opens a space in which we might take seriously the vibrancy of matter and various forms of nonhuman agency.