Series | Book | Chapter

196245

Speaking stones

material agency and interaction in Christian Enzensberger's geschichte der natur

Caroline Schaumann

pp. 165-182

Abstract

This chapter investigates the agentic dimensions of pebbles in Christian Enzensberger's Nicht Eins und Doch: Geschichte der Natur. While stone is a material usually scorned for its inanimateness and has been infamously denounced as "worldless' by Martin Heidegger, Enzensberger lends stone a voice, thus defying a longstanding hierarchy that since the Middle Ages has placed lithic matter at the very bottom of worldly existence. Yet Enzensberger's novel can be read as a continuation and expansion of Heidegger's essay "Der Feldweg." In an experimental, multilingual, and imaginative narrative about sensual encounters with the nonhuman world, Enzensberger's text elucidates a greater range of human experience that emerges when humans give up their claim to exclusive agency to explore, in reversed manner, their entanglement with the earth.

Publication details

Published in:

Schaumann Caroline (2017) German ecocriticism in the anthropocene. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 165-182

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_10

Full citation:

Schaumann Caroline (2017) „Speaking stones: material agency and interaction in Christian Enzensberger's geschichte der natur“, In: C. Schaumann (ed.), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 165–182.