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  • Stone VoicesGeomaterialism in the Ecohumanities
  • Steve Mentz (bio)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Stone: An Inhuman Ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, eds. Making the Geologic Now: Responses to the Material Conditions of Everyday Life. Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2013.
Eric Gidal. Ossianic Uncomformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
Christine Gillis, Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008.
Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stones invite stories. The impulse to inscribe human meanings onto rock faces emerges from the material's durability in time and solidity in space. Here, if anywhere, humans can make lasting marks. From the ochre handprints in Neolithic cave paintings to the anthropic signatures studied today by the scientists in the Working Group on the [End Page 118] Anthropocene, humans have always marked stone. Recent scholarship in what we might call the "geohumanities" or "geomaterialist ecocriticism" takes the complex bonds between humans and geological formations to represent the ecological paradoxes of the present era. To be human in the twenty-first century entails recognizing the wounds our species has carved into geologic strata. Rocks and stones appear not as the "senseless things" that Shakespeare called them in Julius Caesar but instead as receptive and emotive measures of human entanglements with more-than-human entities.1

Humanizing Stone: Cohen, Iovino, Gidal, Gillis

"The world is not for us," writes Jeffrey Cohen in his René Wellek Prize–winning book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman.2 His alienating point insists that the meanings we build out of stones and carve onto stones do not belong to humans alone. The forms and pressures of nonhuman elements enwrap themselves around us through a process he names "geophilia," the love of stone. This "intimate alien" marks the presence of the inhuman near the center of human experience.3 The supposed deadness and still nature of rock, at least within human time spans, serves in Cohen's reading as a spur to story; the phrase "stories of stone" operates in the book as a semirefrain that shows how humans respond to stone, from the medieval theologians Albertus Magnus and John Trevisa to ecomaterialist theorists, including Stacy Alaimo and Bruno Latour. The repeated narrative presence in this book of the travels of the present-day Cohen family visiting meaningful rocks from Bordeaux to Paris to Scotland to Iceland also insinuates human experience into posthuman theory. In Stone rocks move and speak and flow, in ways that surprise us with their physical dynamism and emotional potency.

Serenella Iovino, who has collaborated with Cohen in multiple edited volumes, concludes her MLA award-winning Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation with a shocking juxtaposition of two products of the Italian ecoscape: the wines of Piedmont, "Nebbiolo and its nobler descendants, Barolo and Barbaresco," and cancer-causing asbestos fibers, disseminated by the Eternit factory near the Piedmont vineyards.4 The rich cultural heritage of Italian wines and the industrial "slow violence" of asbestos drive home her ecological argument about human entanglements with the nonhuman world: "Wine breathes, [End Page 119] and so do humans—and they do it much better without asbestos in their lungs."5 Iovino's study builds from her ecocritical commitment to what she calls "narrative scholarship" and, to use a term she developed with her collaborator Serpil Opperman, "storied matter."6 Reading the "material eloquence of the world" in the Italian landscapes and textual histories surrounding the Bay of Naples, Venice, Piedmont, and a series of earthquake sites in Campania, Sicily, and Abruzzo, Iovino unearths, in ways that resonate with Cohen's "stories of stone," textual and material "stories of resistance and creativity that transcend their local reality."7 As the prizes awarded to these two excellent books indicate, one prominent aspect of the geological turn in ecostudies has been toward what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter influentially terms "strategic anthropomorphism," which seeks to entangle human experience with nonhuman landscapes and objects...

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