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This chapter introduces the concept of a “domestic turn” in ecocritical poetry and fiction that consciously demands that biotropes refuse the rural and urban dialectic. Representation under what I call this “domestic turn” in ecocritical writing in the production of biotropes conveys a deep sense of vulnerability of humans, plants and animals to contamination that goes beyond the familiar rural/urban dialectic.

Building off critical gestures from Eva Hesse and Phillip Furia, we claim throughout this essay that Pound’s Canto 30 privileges ecology, an ecopoetics that situates human persons within their organic, natural connections with the “green world” and its cycles of life. Through inventive “translated” myths of two medieval couples (King Pedro of Portugal and his queen, Inês de Castro; Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, Italy and his queen, Lucrezia Borgia), Pound considers that art is analogous to nature’s cycle of rebirth. He is an aesthetic environmentalist ahead of his time, and Canto 30—rather than being limited by an eros/thanatos conceptualization—is constituted by, and interconnected through, a “green” theme, death begetting life. Always interested in not only the cultural conservation of art, but also the living quality of art, the liveliness—the fecundity, the “ecology,” of art—Ezra Pound is also driven to engender the renaissance of art as central to culture and the future of humanity.

This chapter identifies a mode of storytelling that foregrounds material relations among beings as fundamental to narrative and calls this form of expression “obligate storytelling.” Obligate storytelling produces a deep sense of relation among diverse subjects and addresses the conditions of existence for beings and matter in an aesthetic ontology that refuses humanist writing traditions, eschews authorial flourish, and rejects institutionally privileged language.

Chapter Five returns to the question of cultural identity and cultural humanism as a problem for ecocriticism and ecopolitics. In addressing the scale of the planetary, this chapter shows that ecopolitics at the planetary scale is both useful and problematic in critiquing cultural essentialism and cultural humanism. Taking up Timothy Clark’s concept of the “hypothetical scale,” I suggest different modes of reading ecocritical works, and show how ethnic nationalist and cultural humanist approaches to literature in area studies can interrupt ecopolitical thinking.

This chapter introduces my concept of the “biotrope” to navigate the broader question of why and how the material world has proven to be such an effective medium for representing culture. It then argues that ecocriticism needs to be more skeptical about cultural claims. The chapter then shows how literature, poetry, and film are at their most critical and effective when they are not made to replicate our desire for a world that appears to be made by and for specific human collectives or the anthropos.

This chapter examines how documentarian Tsuchimoto Noriaki created a perceptual field for invisible toxins. I discuss the formal, theoretical, and social modes in Tsuchimoto’s nuclear and medical films, paying particular attention to what I call his “optics of ambulation,” his refusal of montage, and his capture of the impact of toxins over time--what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.”