IMS seminar with Asun López-Varela

Abstract

Contemporary ecopoetry has increasingly challenged anthropocentric conceptions of perception, creativity, and agency by foregrounding the relational entanglement of language, matter, and environment. Rather than treating poetic expression as the projection of a sovereign human consciousness onto a passive landscape, recent work within intermedial and semiotic theory invites us to understand poetic form as emerging from dynamic exchanges among heterogeneous material supports—bodily perception, inscriptional practices, environmental processes, and cultural memory. This article proposes a theoretical account of Kathleen Jamie’s eco-poetry through the lens of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics and the intermedial aesthetics, arguing that poetic “noticing” functions as a distributed semiotic practice rather than a purely subjective act of observation.

Drawing on Peirce’s triadic model of the sign and his phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the study conceptualises Jamie’s poetics as a field in which sensation, encounter, and habit converge to produce meaning across human and more-than-human agencies. Intermediality is thus understood not merely as the combination of verbal and visual forms, but as a process of transduction in which wind, stone, tide, birdcall, and inscription co-participate in signification. Language becomes one medium among others within a broader ecological semiosis.

Central to this account is Jamie’s practice of “serious noticing,” which the article interprets as an ethical and aesthetic mode of attention that redistributes agency away from the observing subject toward the relational event itself. Noticing operates as a form of interpretant activity: it mediates between material presence and symbolic articulation, allowing the poem to emerge as the trace of an encounter rather than an imposition of mastery. Through close readings of selected poems, the paper demonstrates how Jamie’s work enacts a non-anthropocentric poetics in which perception becomes participatory, writing becomes a site of intermedial translation, and the environment asserts its own semiotic force.

By situating Jamie’s eco-poetry within a Peircean and intermedial framework, the article ultimately advances a model of literary agency grounded in attentiveness, reciprocity, and material co-production, proposing “noticing” as both a methodological principle and an ecological ethics of form.

Bio:

Asun López-Varela is Assoc. Prof. at Facultad Filología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She holds a PhD Anglo-American Culture and Literary Studies (2002), a Diploma of Advanced PhD Studies in Spanish Literature from UNED (2004), and a Master in Education Management from the Open University London (2000). Her research interests are Comparative Literature, Science & Literature, Cultural Studies, Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics and Green Humanities and Sustainability. 

How to attend:

This seminar can be attended in person in room Dacke or on Zoom by emailing ims@lnu.se.