Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference 2013: Ecomedia and the Multimodal

Two panels at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment illustrated how multimodal ecomedia and ecocriticsm have become. The first of these, “Prosthetic and Posthuman in Contemporary Science Fiction,” included three presentations representing at least four text types: novel, film, television, and comic and graphic novel.

Pelin Kumbet’s “Posthumans as Supplement Prosthetics to Natural Human beings: Liminality of Beings in Never Let Me Go” highlights how clones become prosthetics in the novel and film, Never Let Me Go. According to Kumbet, the film adaptation faithfully captures the struggles the posthuman Kathy endures to delay her and her boyfriend’s inevitable end. In the horrific context of both novel and film, natural humans survive because posthumans have been cloned to provide them with needed body parts, living prosthetics that have been “grown” for them. Kathy demonstrates her own humanity through her artistic ability, but even those creative manifestations cannot save her in the dystopia of the narrative. Instead, Kathy is seen as resource grown for harvest, as an element of nonhuman nature with less value than the natural humans her body parts support.  

Donna Binns’ “The Bionic Woman: Machine or Human?” explored how the bionic woman of the 1970s television series complicated views of prosthesis and bionics that suggest such physical additions only augment the body rather than disfiguring or disabling it. Unlike the bionic man, the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) rejects her bionics both emotionally and physically. Although she survives the initial physical rejection, she never completely accepts the bionic prosthetics forced upon her. According to Binns, prosthetics transform Jaime less into a superhero than a person with disabilities. Binns notes several examples that illustrate how much Jaime’s body continued to reject her bionics, suggesting the incompatibility of nature and technology, as well as the limitations of both bionics and prosthetics.

Micha Gerrit’s “Concrete, Swamp Thing, and the Posthuman” explored issues of the posthuman illustrated by comic books and graphic novels. Gerrit demonstrated well the humanity of the characters Concrete and Swamp Thing, despite their nonhuman and/or posthuman representations with the context of the comics. Ultimately, the panel not only highlighted the interdisciplinarity of ecocritical readings, but also the burgeoning possibilities of applying ecocritical approaches to multimodal texts and ecomedia.

The panel, Ecocriticism and Chinese Culture” demonstrated how broadened visions of text cross cultural borders to include literature, as in Liu, Bei’s Shandong “On Zhang Wei’s Sense of Place and its Contemporary Cultural Significance,” visual art as in Kiu-wai Chu’s “Neon-Greening New Landscapes in Contemporary Chinese Art: From Daoist Ecology to Eco-materialism,” documentary, as in Xinmin D. Liu’s “Emotive Intervention in “Documenting” China’s Manufactured Landscapes,” and nonfiction, as in  Song, Lili’s “On the Pathos of Chinese Environmental Writings.”