"Narrative Medicine” in the Age of COVID-19: The Power of Creative Writing to Reimagine Environmental Crisis

Adopting a "narrative medicine” approach to examining selected examples of contemporary "corona writing” presents rich possibilities for developing a methodological approach to explore the complex relation between eco-anxiety and the recent explosion of literary creation across variously widespread digital applications. Very little extant research exists around the wellbeing and therapeutic potential of the written word (e.g., bibliotherapy), and/or exploring the possibilities for using modes of creative writing (e.g., fiction, nonfiction, poetry, prose, and dramatic writing, among others) for therapeutic benefit (e.g., autoethnography, therapeutic story-telling, strategic story-telling, writing therapy, poetry therapy, and/or elements of psychodrama, etc.). The aim of this chapter therefore is twofold: (1) to contribute to this dearth in critical scholarship concerning the wellbeing implications of creative literary expression in times of environmental crisis from the perspective of "narrative medicine, " and (2) to shed some important light on the ways in which the current explosion in "corona writing” signals a particularly significant alignment between creative literary expression and new ways of engaging with the imaginative and psychological challenges of the Anthropocene. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Our Children Will Fight for the Climate: How Congo-Basin Writers Prophesied Global Youth Climate Activism 1

According to Riikka Paloniemi and Annukka Vainio (2011), as early as 1992, the United Nations in its international programme dubbed Agenda 21 asserted that young people, who constitute about 30 percent of the world's population, are important stakeholders in achieving sustainable development (398-399). Much momentum has accumulated in the direction of youth activism for the climate and environment. Besides garnering much recognition from the international community as important actors in climate change policy and action, youth-led climate commitment has continued to grow in leaps and bounds. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this movement mobilized millions of school-going children/youths across many cities throughout the world to skip classes on Fridays and protest, asking their governments and corporate bodies to concretely address the global climate and environmental crises and save their future.2 Greta Thunberg has spoken to world leaders on the need to curb carbon emissions and has addressed the issue of climate change at many high-level gatherings, including COP24, which was held from in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland;the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019 and 2020;the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Commission in February 2019;an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2019;and the UK Parliament in Westminster, also in April 2019. [...]the School Strikes for Climate movement has not only caused the resignation of Belgian Environment Minister Joke Schauvliege (who had falsely claimed that children's climate protests were 'set-up') but has also been positively received by key global figures such as UN Secretary General António Guterres, who, following an unprecedented turnout of approximately 1.4 million young protesters in over 120 countries on 15th March 2019, remarked that "the climate strikers should inspire us all to act at the next UN summit".3 Moreover, on 12th April 2019, having witnessed the massive turnout of young protesters the month before, twenty-two renowned scientists across the globe published a letter in the journal Science acknowledging that "the concerns of young protesters are justified" and pledging their support for the youth strikes for climate (Hagedorn et al. 2019, 139-140).

Practicing Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities during the Age of COVID and Beyond: An Interview with Scott Slovic

Scott Slovic, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho in the United States, was the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995, and he edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the major journal in the field of ecocriticism, from 1995-2020. He is currently the co-editor of two book series: Routledge Series in World Literatures and the Environment (2017-present) and Routledge Environmental Humanities (2018-present). Professor Slovic has written, edited, or co-edited thirty books in the field of ecocriticism. This interview focuses on the latest ecocritical developments, as well as key issues in the environmental humanities, in the Age of COVID and more broadly, the context of the Anthropocene. It stresses mainly three aspects: new ideas and directions in ecocriticism, the clarification of some key concepts in the environmental humanities, and studies of ecocriticism relevant with China. Professor Slovic expounds the "fourth wave” and "fifth wave” of ecocriticism, scrutinizes various terms, such as Anthropocene ecocriticism, climate fiction criticism, material ecocriticism, affective ecocriticism, empirical ecocriticism, critical animal studies, critical plant studies, etc., and crystallizes the connections and differences between ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and the medical-environmental humanities. He also explores the impacts of COVID-19 on ecocriticism studies, reveals the concerns of establishing "TCM ecocriticism,” sheds light on the new possibilities for ecocriticism in the future, and offers constructive suggestions for Chinese scholars © 2023, Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature.All Rights Reserved.

Ecocriticism: Environment and Covid-19

From air we breathe to water we drink;we are using earth's resources at an expandable rate and in return, we are producing excess carbon dioxide by cutting trees, urban and rural development and climate change. There are certain questions that are raised and seek to address the relationship between man and nature. The paper will hopefully contribute towards the exposing and undoing of the various kinds of denialism that have held us in its tight hold. Ecocriticism continues to support and facilitate attempts to establish a sense and morally sustainable set of relationships between us, human beings and other inanimate and animate environments. Human beings have been continuously destroying their own planet as they may not continue to exist. The paper highlights the Covid-19 crisis and our impact on environment. The present paper gives a summary of Coronavirus, its existing state of spread and environmental and ecological risks resulting from the pandemic. © 2022 - Kalpana Corporation.

Human Attitudes to Nature in Four Stories from TheDecameron2020

The Decameron 2020 started in Croatia as an online literary event in the time of the first quarantine caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and resulted in an e-book of fifty-two selected short stories. Its initiators and editors, Ana Cerovac, Vesna Kurilić and Antonija Mežnarić, recognized the peculiarity of the experience of living in the end times, as well as the potential for comparison of the e-book with Boccaccio's classic, and set up an online space where authors from Croatia and the region could (re)create or transform their experiences, or reflect upon them. This paper focuses on four stories from the collection in which nature is given special significance: Algernonova osveta (Algernon's Revenge) by Nataša Milić, Zaražena (Infected) by Sunčica Mamula, Redukcije (Reductions) by Ana Kutleša and 2030 by Radmila Rakas. It investigates the range of feelings and attitudes towards nature in the time of pandemic and quarantine, as reflected in these four stories. © 2022 Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu. All right reserved.

Healing the Earth, transforming the mind: how the COVID-19 pandemic generates new insights through the Econarrative writing workshop

In this chapter we will analyse how we can initiate a process of transformation in our ways of perceiving the relationships with living ecosystems in the context of the global health crisis unfolding in the Anthropocene era. More specifically, we will examine the narratives produced by the students at Paul Valery University in Montpellier, France, in the frame of an international project of writing workshops (ECONARRATIVE) centered on the pandemic and ecology, held from January to March 2021, with the support of the MSH-SUD (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme) in Montpellier.

The New Hemingway Studies

Identities shifts focus to critical lenses for analyzing the author and his literary output. del Gizzo's opening essay poignantly highlights how Hemingway's family is crucial for understanding the writer and his literature, particularly in regard to mental health, fatherhood, and the ways Hemingway writes about children. [...]of these mechanisms, Glass convincingly positions Hemingway as a global phenomenon as well as an American one. The collection offers excellent overviews of many critical approaches, identifies multiple avenues for advancing understandings of Hemingway's life and work, and ultimately marks 2000 as a turning point for Hemingway studies as well as the world. 2020 will be remembered (at least for a while) as a similarly significant moment thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and a retrospective in another two decades would hopefully reveal that year to also be the start of a prosperous period in Hemingway studies.

Pandemic, Space and Environment in Blindness by José Saramago

Mentioned and praised even by the Noble prize committee, in 1998, Blindness (published in 1995) is a complex novel dealing with the human nature and behaviour in the context of a crisis generated by a sudden and unknown disease. The relevance of reading this book these days, when the entire humanity (and I daresay our planet as an interdependent system) is facing a terrible viral pandemic, is obvious and helpful. The present paper aims to explore José Saramagos novel from a combined geo-ecocritical perspective, emphasizing the interrelatedness of humanity, space, and surrounding environment. The main research questions of this study are: how do humans interact with the places they live in and the ecosphere during a pandemic? and how does a pandemic affect the human behaviour? The geoecocritical approach is due to the interdependence between space and environment, one can hardly explore one of the previously mentioned components of the fictional world without referring to the other. Another aspect that this essay will touch is the alteration of peoples emotions due to the difficulties they face during pandemics and the importance of emotion management in these extreme situations. For the proposed analysis the following methods will be indispensable: close-reading, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and narratology.

"Do They See Me as a Virus?": Imagining Asian American Environmental Games

[...]beyond the ecocritical values and ideals that frame and underpin each, these three games raise additional questions and provocations concerning other norms, identities, structures, even feelings that interact or intersect with their obvious and thematic environmental concerns. Night Flyer, Even the Ocean, and Pandemic 2020 and their respective designers theorize their own work, their relationship to their identities and positionalities, and the potential for Asian American games. [...]the games and designers presented below bridge more traditional environmental studies, Asian American ecocriticism, and the recent environmental turn in video games studies. All three games foreground Asian American design, experience, and representation (sometimes directly or indirectly), and offer points of view from bats to power plant workers to viruses that decenter white male bodies, gazes, and masculinist fantasies of control or domination over the natural world. [...]these games and designers gesture toward Asianfuturist possibilities, potential lines of inquiry, resistance, critique, and even hope that center Asian American identities, experience, engagements, and worldbuilding.