Of Men and Crabs: Connectedness to Nature, Others, and Self

This work explores human connectedness to nature by engaging with Josué de Castro’s novel Of Men and Crabs. The novel is a tale of childhood, which follows young João Paulo, the surviving son of Zé Luis, who settles on the shoreline to escape the draught and hunger of the inlands. Drawing on an ecological view of perception, I examine the interconnectedness between humans, nature, others, and the self, with a focus on relationality and entanglement. From a critical perspective, catching crabs emerges not only as an act of survival but also as a form of environmental identity and a way of establishing relation with non-human actors. The Northeastern littoral, located between continental and oceanic spaces, provides a behavior setting for people to escape the sertão draught by moving to the coast, where an abundance of water offers the prospect of a better life. The mudflats and the people who live near them, are entangled in the ‘crab cycle’. Thus, landscape affordances are related not only to materialities but also to people’s relationships with human and non-human actors. In conclusion, I argue that the novel's critique of the complex interaction between humans and the environment offers a deeper understanding of connectedness to nature in terms of more-than-human experiences.
Keywords: environmental psychology; affordances; ecological perception; human-nature connectedness; Of Men and Crabs, Josué de Castro; sertão

Helena Hunter (English, Linguistics & Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the University of Warwick, UK)
Synaesthesia and Sensory Scaling in Carol Watts’s Poem ‘Kelptown’.

This paper investigates the multi-sensory poetics of ‘Kelptown’, a poem by Carol Watts (2020) exploring the challenges posed to both kelp (seaweed) and humans in the ongoing environmental crisis. Building on Skoulding's (2009) assertion that Watts’s poetry enacts a ‘synaesthetic interchange’, the paper unpacks poetic methods that connect the reader to kelp’s umwelt (Uexküll 1934). The notion of ‘sensory scaling ’is proposed as a lens to examine scales of perception, attention, and relation that bring the distant world of kelp forests and their potential demise closer. This sensory scaling fosters sensitivity and self-reflexivity, creating opportunities to imagine from the perspective of kelp. The paper proposes that the perceptual experiments of the poem place and displace the reader in the world of kelp. This subjective leap is achieved through direct address, which calls upon the reader to envision what it would be like to be fully submerged in the ocean ‘without surface or air’ (Watts 2020). In conclusion, the paper examines the role of sound in the poem as a means of sensory connection to the voiceless, highlighting how poetry can listen to and with multi-species worlds.
Keywords: poetry, scale, sound, synaesthesia

Ally Louks (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK)

Literary Cultures of Olfactory Dysfunction

In this paper, I will examine how literary representations of smell disorders, such as anosmia, parosmia and hyposmia, respond to the personal reverberations of olfactory augmentation, to the disproportionate effects of olfactory disruption on marginalised groups, and to the current and projected global impairment of olfaction as a result of anthropogenic pollution. Posing new questions for disability studies about the relationships between cultural representations of smell disorders, lived experiences, and structural inequality, I will offer an account of the value of critically engaging with literary responses to olfactory disturbances and inequalities. I suggest that literary texts can renegotiate the importance of olfaction within the world of the text, a process that can productively subvert readers’ habitual relations to their own sense of smell. Further, I argue that literary texts can couch the loss, impairment or distortion of smell through metaphorical and allegorical techniques, which shed light on broader sociological themes, as well as the management and distribution of sensory disruption within the Anthropocene. Interdisciplinary in nature, this paper will draw on a portfolio of textual examples, but will also engage with critical disability studies, the medical humanities, anthropological and psychological studies, and neuroscientific findings relating to smell dysfunction.
Keywords: Smell disorders, Literature, Disability, Inequality, Sensory dysfunction