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Editor’s Note
This special edition of Green Letters on digital environments also includes two essays that could not be published in the earlier, unthemed edition because of copyright issues. Now that these have been resolved, we are delighted to be able to print articles by Timo Maran and Sarah Nolan.
Maran is the leading figure in biosemiotic ecocriticism, which emerged in the Baltic region of northern Europe. ASLE-UKI was honoured that he accepted our invitation to speak at our conference in Bath in 2010, along with the editor of this special edition, Sid Dobrin. Biosemiotis is of particular interest to ecocritics because it offers a powerful theoretical basis on which to renegotiate inherited boundaries of culture and nature. It shares with conventional semiotics the practice of interpreting culture as a system of signs, but rather than accepting the humanist notion of language as a decisive break with nature, biosemiotics sees enculturated signs as elaborating and extending natural sign systems of various kinds. The analysis Maran presents here provides an introduction to biosemiotics, but also provides a compelling example of how it might work as a form of literary criticism. Readers who find this approach illuminating will be pleased to know that Green Letters will soon be publishing a special edition on biosemiotics.
Sarah Nolan’s essay conforms in outline to established models of ecopoetic reading, but departs decisively from the ecopoetic canon. Given the colossal prison population in the USA (over 700 per 100,000 population, ten times as many as Norway) and the blatant racial biases in its composition, her presentation of an ecocritical reading of prison poetry is a contribution to environment justice criticism of a particularly powerful and poignant kind.
Greg Garrard
University of British Columbia, Canada
Notes
1. Skynet is the military surveillance and information system whose achievement of ‘self-awareness’ precipitates global nuclear war in The Terminator (1984).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sidney I. Dobrin
Sidney I. Dobrin is University of Florida Research Foundation Professor in the Department of English. He is the founding Director/Editor of Trace Innovation Initiative. He is the author and editor of more than seventeen books about ecology, writing, media, and technology, including Postcomposition, which won the 2011 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the best book in composition theory. Dobrin is currently developing augmented reality (AR) applications for teaching and critique and is co-authoring the first AR fishing guidebook for University Press of Florida. He is also completing a book for Texas A&M University Press about recreational saltwater sportfishing and the future of the world’s oceans.