Papers by Mandy Bloomfield
The Review of English Studies
Critical Quarterly, 2017
Ecopoetics may not be the most obvious frame within which to read Tom Raworth's work, since his p... more Ecopoetics may not be the most obvious frame within which to read Tom Raworth's work, since his poetry seems not to be overtly interested in environmentalism or even in 'nature' more generally. However, this paper demonstrates that his poetry can productively be read as articulating an
Contemporary Literature, 2014
This article examines American poet Susan Howe's engagement with landscape and place across the t... more This article examines American poet Susan Howe's engagement with landscape and place across the trajectory of her career, centrally examining three key poems: Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Thorow (1987) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007). In so doing, it demonstrates this work's pertinence for discussions of environmental aesthetics. Starting
Textual Practice, 2015
At the turn of the last millennium, the philosopher and historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller ar... more At the turn of the last millennium, the philosopher and historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller argued that the period when the gene was ‘the core explanatory concept of biological structure and fun...
Textual Practice, 2015
Beyond the gene roundtable discussion This virtual discussion between biomedical researchers and ... more Beyond the gene roundtable discussion This virtual discussion between biomedical researchers and academics in the literary humanities took place in June-July 2013, through the medium of blog and email. The participants are Tim Spector (Genetic Epidemiology), Karen Temple (Medical Genetics), Angelique Richardson (Literary Studies), Deborah J.G. Mackay (Human Genetics) and Peter Garratt (Literary Studies). The conversation was initiated and convened by Mandy Bloomfield (Literary Studies). What develops in the course of the discussion is a sense of the ways in which biomedical researchers working on genetics are discovering new complexities with profound cultural and philosophical implications, whilst those working in the humanities are considering what those implications might be, but from a position on the edges of specialist scientific knowledge and modes of thinking. Perhaps inevitably, we sometimes find we are not speaking quite the same language. And this question of language-of metaphors, varieties of meaning, precision and indeterminacy-crops up time and again in this discussion. Perhaps it is in these frictive edges between disciplines that productive dialogue can happen, and we can learn from the differences between perspectives. For example, in this discussion the 'nurture-nature' dichotomy is interrogated in different ways, but with equivalent levels of reflective rigour, by researchers in the biomedical and humanities disciplines alike. What do we really mean by those terms? What are the historical components of this conceptual divide? Is it even possible to separate 'nurture' from 'nature'? If a consensus emerges from this discussion, it is that current research in both the sciences and the humanities is blurring the distinctions between such dichotomous constructions as 'nature vs. nurture' in ways that are changing thinking and practices across the disciplines. Whether this takes us to a revaluation of Victorian understandings of organism and environment, or into ever-more complicated relationships
Textual Practice, 2009
In this highly unusual narrative of poetic beginnings, Howe emphasises the formative influence of... more In this highly unusual narrative of poetic beginnings, Howe emphasises the formative influence of her early career as a visual artist on her development as a writer. Interestingly, in reflecting on her transition from visual to language-based art, the poet describes words as having ...
Green Letters, 2013
This essay examines recent British poetry informed by Concrete and ‘open-field’ poetics which eng... more This essay examines recent British poetry informed by Concrete and ‘open-field’ poetics which engages with landscape through experimentation with the spatiality of the poetic page. Amounting to much more than just formal playfulness, this mode of ‘landscape writing’ raises pertinent questions about the politics and ethics of environmental aesthetics. In particular, it offers opportunities for investigating and complicating Timothy Morton's critical formulation of ‘nature writing’ as ‘ecomimesis’. My argument draws on examples from the work of three poets whose writing eschews straightforwardly mimetic relations to landscape but nevertheless claims connections between the space of the page and material geographies. These poetries ambivalently participate in an attenuated form of ‘ecomimesis’ and in doing so, provide occasions for critical reflection on the ethical imperatives and problematics of this aesthetic impulse.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
In his contribution to Joy Harjo's 2020 United States Poet Laureate project to create a "Map of F... more In his contribution to Joy Harjo's 2020 United States Poet Laureate project to create a "Map of First People's Poetry," Craig Santos Perez revisits a formative moment that recurs across his poetic and scholarly oeuvre. On the first day at his new high school after migrating with his family from Guåhan (Guam) to California, he is asked to point out to the class the location of his homeland:. .. And when I stepped in front of the world map on the wall, it transformed into a mirror: the Pacific Ocean,
Contemporary Literature, 2019
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Papers by Mandy Bloomfield