10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 h ubert z apF Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 1 Literature and Survival It may at first sound counterintuitive to connect literature - often seen as a phenomenon of culture not vitally relevant to the necessities of life - with the question of survival Yet there is evidence from various disciplines that the well-worn stereotype of the basic irrelevance of literature to the serious issues of survival is becoming questionable In the biocultural theory of literature as advocated by Nancy Easterlin, for example, art and narrative enact a significant evolutionary function not only by providing orientation and coordinating group behavior but also by creating polysemic symbolic objects or stories which helped to develop a sense of the complexities and “cognitive ambiguities” that were important for the development of the brain and of higher-order social organisation As she writes in her article “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind”: Concerned with survival, evolutionary theory focuses on the functional value of species traits, since organisms that have the physical, psychical, and behavioral traits ‘designed’ to help them operate efficiently in their environment will help them endure. Traits that require significant investments of time and physiological effort, such as bipedal locomotion, are ‘expensive’ in evolutionary terms, and the puzzle of their selective advantage is particularly intriguing Art behaviors, such as the production, distribution, and consumption of literary artifacts, are enormously expensive Most evolutionary scholars take the view that, given their costliness, the arts must contribute to human survival 1 And she continues: “If the arts have contributed to human survival over the course of evolution, it is likely that they still do so, and if they have had such a fundamental role in the shaping and continuity of our species, then the marginalisation of literature and other arts today seems grotesquely ill-advised ” 2 1 Nancy Easterlin, “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind,” New Literary History 44 4 (2013), 662-663 2 Ibid 262 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio sees the surplus value of art and of the literary imagination in the “homoeostatic impulse” which propels ahead cultural development by detecting, notably in the form of storytelling, “imbalances in the life process” caused by social and cultural disruptions In transacting these imbalances in narrative conflicts and scenarios of crisis, this homoeostatic sensorium of literature becomes an important force of continual self-correction and self-transformation in culture that makes it possible “to rehearse specific aspects of life and […] to exercise moral judgement and moral action ” 3 In this sense, Damasio contends that “the arts prevailed in evolution because they had survival value and contributed to the development of the notion of well-being ” The notion of well-being here already points to a cultural dimension of survival that exceeds the mere physical survival of individuals and the species, as it invokes the concept of the ‘good life’ that has been centrally discussed in philosophical ethics and has remained an important reference point in contemporary literary ethics and ecology as well in connection with the larger question of cultural sustainability Before I address this cultural dimension of survival in a more sustained way, it is worth mentioning that literature and the arts do seem to have a physical, bodily, and medical survival value as well A recent statistical study at Yale, for instance, indicating that regular reading tends to prolong life significantly, has been seen as a welcome argument for book culture in a time of digital and media cultures 4 In a psychological sense, the survival value of art and literature for concrete individuals is indicated by numerous cases of writing as autotherapeutic practice, with Goethe’s Werther as one famous example. The narrative doubling of the self in a poetics of fictional reinvention seems to liberate the writer’s psyche from its immediate pressures and thus allows what Damasio calls the “extended consciousness” of the imagination to unfold its resilient potential of dealing with crisis and trauma In a collective, sociohistorical sense, this potential has been associated with national literary cultures such as the literature of Canada, which has been explicitly if controversially claimed by Margaret Atwood to be shaped by the defining trope of survival, but also more generally in postcolonial studies has been linked to the literary response to colonisation, slavery, and dispossession, which characteristically combines the living memory of the traumatic 3 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, 2010), 292 4 Amy Ellis Nutt, “The Best Reason for Reading? Book Lovers Live Longer, Scientists Say,” Washington Post, 09 August 2016, https: / / communications yale edu/ sites/ default/ files/ 08.09.2016_the_best_reason_for_reading_book_lovers_live_longer_scientists_say _the_washington_post pdf, n p Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 263 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 past with a search for new beginnings The resilient potential of art and literature has likewise been discussed in relation to totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and even in the extreme case of the Shoah, as a desperate form of creative response that aimed at least in writing to survive the annihilating forces of history I cannot go here into the troubled relation between art and the holocaust, which is in itself a vast and multifaceted field of research, but would just point out that, as examples such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz or Ruth Klüger’s Weiter leben indicate, the memorising of literary texts from Homer and Dante to Schiller’s ballads seems to have been a remarkable source of spiritual strength, and that even under the extreme circumstances of the camps, artistic creativity, as far as it was possible at all, provided a desperate form of maintaining a residual sense of self and humanity in the midst of its utter negation The vital role of artistic creativity for holocaust victims was officially documented in the 2010 Yad Vashem exhibition Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity, which showcased the “artistic expression of individual survivors” that at the same time served as “a legacy to others,” as the official comment on the exhibition explains. 5 2 Literature and the Ecological Crisis I would however like to focus on a specific contemporary context in which the relation between literature and survival has gained still another dimension, the context of ecology In the face of the environmental crisis that has moved into the public awareness in the early 21st century as a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of life on the planet, it has become more urgent than ever to define what the response of literature to this crisis should be, and what forms and genres of literary narrative appear adequate to this challenge Already in the 1970s, Joseph Meeker addressed this topic in his book The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic, one of the influential works of ecocriticism 6 Meeker argued that a dominant strain of the Western literary tradition, inasmuch as it revolved around the genre of tragedy and the noble actions and heroic deaths of great individuals, was to a significant extent responsible for shaping an anthropocentric ideology of moral superiority that led to the exploitation and degradation of nature - and of other 5 Yad Vashem, “‘Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity’: Hundreds of creative artworks to be displayed in new Yad Vashem Exhibition,” press release, 11 April 2010, www yadvashem org/ press-release/ 06-april-2010-09-24 html, n p 6 Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (Phoenix: U of Arizona P, 1997) 264 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 peoples and cultures - whose disastrous consequences we are confronting today An ethologist and comparatist literary scholar, Meeker contends that the comic mode, often considered as minor in the Western tradition, provides an alternative, more ecologically-inspired vision of the place of humans in life and nature, as it celebrates survival rather than self-sacrifice, improvisational compromise rather than uncompromising conflict, pragmatic tolerance of plurality and imperfection rather than moral perfectionism as its generic features. In this affirmative and basically cooperative attitude towards one’s own life and to life in general, this play ethics of comedy, according to Meeker, corresponds to the principles of ecology and evolution much more than tragedy Tragedy focuses on an individual hero who “suffers and dies for his ideals, while the comic hero survives without them,” because comedy is aware of the multiple dependencies necessary for the sustenance of life Meeker therefore calls for revising the tragic-heroic mode in favor of the comic, life-affirming mode that was prevalent in premodern times and non-Western cultures in trickster tales and narratives of human-animal-metamorphoses, but also in exceptional cases of the Western canon such as Dante’s Divina Commedia or in the picaresque traditions of Western writing: “Picaresque life,” he argues, “is animal existence augmented by the imaginative and adaptive powers of the human mind ” I think that Meeker’s ideas are provocative and persuasive to an extent, but he overstates his point and underestimates the potential of genres and art forms other than comedy likewise to perform the function of a life-adaptive creative self-renewal that he solely attributes to comedy In fact, key texts of the literary archive across different genres can be described from an ecological perspective Shakespeare’s plays, including his tragedies, have been analysed within an ecocritical framework, 7 as has Goethe’s Faust, which has become a frequent reference for ecocritical German Studies A prominent example from my own field of American literature is Melville’s Moby Dick, in which the tragic-heroic mode turns into a critical parable of anthropocentric hybris personified in Captain Ahab, whose self-destructive demonisation of the White Whale is counteracted by the narrator Ishmael’s awareness of the interconnectivity of all life, of what he calls humans’ “Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals ” 8 It is its polyphonic, multigeneric composition that turns the novel into a complex assessment of the precarious place of human civilisation on the planet And it is the narrator who relates the story 7 Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: OUP, 2015) 8 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1981; Boston: Riverside, 1956), 254 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 265 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 of his survival of the catastrophe as a cautionary tale to the reader which anticipates contemporary narratives of environmental disaster What is also problematic about Meeker’s approach is that the pragmatic play ethic he advocates lacks one important part of any ethics - the concept of responsibility What Hans Jonas calls Das Prinzip Verantwortung, the ‘principle of responsibility’ as a new categorical imperative in times of environmental crisis, necessitates ongoing reflection on those higher ethical values that Meeker wants to eliminate from his comic literary playworlds 9 This becomes evident when Meeker approvingly quotes a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 about an old Italian whoremaster who first served the Nazis and later the Americans in occupied Italy in the Second World War, commenting that “I was fanatically for the Germans when they protected us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are protecting us against the Germans, I am fanatically pro-American ” Here, the limits of Meeker’s endorsement of pragmatic muddling through, of the primacy of mere physical versus ethical forms of survival become obvious On the other hand, the uncompromising postulation of responsibility towards planetary life can itself turn into a dogmatic and indeed destructive mindset, as in the case of the bioengineer Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Madd- Addam trilogy of speculative fiction, in which Crake eliminates the existing human species in a pharmaceutical mass murder to replace it with a genetically engineered, environmental-friendly posthuman species in order to save the earth from destruction by a hopelessly greedy and egocentric humanity 10 The ethical challenge of the trilogy consists in the paradox that the consequences of such an apocalyptic ecocentrism are as unsettling as the dystopian scenarios of the future of our civilisation that the novels depict 3 Cultural Ecology and the Sustainability of Texts The ecological dimension of literature, and its potential of contributing to cultural sustainability and survival, is thus not limited to a certain genre but is a general feature of imaginative texts, as I have tried to argue in my work on cultural ecology. I will confine myself here to a few summarising remarks on the relation between cultural ecology and sustainability, which is specifically addressed in my 2016 book on Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts 11 9 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1979) 10 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago Press, 2003) 11 Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London et al : Bloomsbury, 2016) 266 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 A basic assumption of cultural ecology is that imaginative texts are not only a preferred medium of representing the culture-nature relationship but that in their aesthetic transformation of experience, they act like an ecological force in the larger system of cultural discourses Building on Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind and his idea of the ‘patterns which connect’ diverse domains of life and mind beyond their disciplinary separation 12 , and on Peter Finke’s notion of ‘cultural ecosystems’ as an autopoietic sphere of human self-organisation that links external environments to the internal worlds of language, communication, and imagination, 13 literature is conceived as a particularly potent form of cultural ecology, which exhibits a special sensitivity to those connecting patterns across established boundaries of discourse, relating mind to life, cultural to natural ecosystems, human to more-than-human domains in complex forms of embodied interactivity Literary texts provide a transformative site of cultural self-reflection and self-exploration, in which the historically marginalised and excluded is semiotically empowered and activated as a source of artistic creativity and is thus reconnected to the larger cultural system in both deconstructive and reconstructive ways This cultural-ecological function relates, on the one hand, to the historical process of which literature is part and to which it responds Wolfgang Iser has described this process not in terms of a binary opposition between fiction and reality but as a triadic relation between the Real, the Fictive, and the Imaginary, in which the Fictive is a cultural form mediating the institutionalised pressures of the Real with the anarchic and amorphous impulses of the Imaginary 14 This model ascribes to literature the function of critically balancing one-sided developments of the civilisational process and testing out unrealised possibilities in the alternative scenarios of imaginative worlds It is adapted to cultural ecology by extending Iser’s anthropological imaginary, which has its sole basis in the human subject, towards an ecological imaginary, which opens the text-culture relationship to the ‘patterns which connect’ (Bateson) subjective and objective, human and nonhuman worlds in forms of life-sustaining interactivity The cultural-ecological potential of texts also relates, on the other hand, to the deep-time evolutionary function of literature as described in Nancy 12 Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973) 13 Peter Finke, “Die evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur,” Anglia 124 1 (2006), 175-217; Peter Finke, “Kulturökologie,” Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften, eds Ansgar Nünnung/ Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 248-279 14 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 267 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 Easterlin’s biocultural theory of literature as well as, in different ways, in biosemiotics and eco-phenomenology 15 The response of literature to culture is placed into a deep-historical perspective, in which the archives of literature are sites of the long-term memory of culture-nature coevolution that is inscribed into the generative matrix of imagination and narrative Recurrent motifs from this ‘deep sustainability’ of literature, as Kate Rigby calls it, 16 are the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire as forms of material agency in texts which, as Rigby and Evi Zemanek among others show, are still very much alive in contemporary literature; 17 or also the close symbiotic relation between human and nonhuman life forms in imaginative texts in what Louise Westling describes as the ‘human animal dance,’ which she traces from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf; 18 as well as the motif of metamorphosis, which in its shapeshifting transition between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate forms assumes no essential separation but an ontological interconnectedness of all beings and as such likewise represents a continuing source of literary creativity from the deep-time literary archive to the present This is perhaps especially visible in the contemporary literature of the Anthropocene - as the recent German poetry collection Lyrik im Anthropozän amply demonstrates, in which hybrid beings, material agencies, and shapeshifting identities are conspicuously present in this experimental poetics of the Anthropocene 19 How, then, can this notion of literature as cultural ecology be related to the wider discourse of sustainability that has gained such prominence in recent years? Since the 1972 Club of Rome report on the Limits of Growth and later the 1987 Brundtland Report of the UN, sustainability has become a key term 15 Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012); Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life/ Culture/ Biosemiotics (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2016); Louise Westling, “Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary,” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed Hubert Zapf (Berlin et al : De Gruyter, 2016), 65-83 16 Kate Rigby, “Deep Sustainability: Ecopoetics, Enjoyment and Ecstatic Hospitality,” Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, eds Adeline Johns-Putra/ John Parham/ Louise Squire (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017), 52-75 17 See Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015); Evi Zemanek, “Elemental Poetics: Material Agency in Contemporary German Poetry,” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, eds Gabriele Dürbeck et al (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 281-295 18 Louise Westling, “Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf,” Anglia 124 3 (Winter 2006), 11-43 19 Anja Bayer/ Daniela Seel, eds , All dies, Majestät, ist Deins. Lyrik im Antrhopozän (Berlin: kookbooks, 2016) 268 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 in international debates which was still primarily defined in economic and political terms but also included a transgenerational agenda that was intended “to [make development sustainable to ensure that it] meet[s] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” and that vitally involved “the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities ” 20 The awareness of the interdependence of long-term human agency and well-being with the life-sustaining ecosystems of the nonhuman world became the driving force for further differentiations of the concept that increasingly entailed not only a new view of economics but of society as well, including questions of participation, global environmental injustice, gender and diversity issues, and alternative forms of living As a transdisciplinary project, sustainability studies have become a research focus in many academic departments across the world, in which typically disciplines from the natural sciences as well as the social sciences, but rarely from cultural and literary studies, are involved It is one of the aims of the new umbrella term of the Environmental Humanities to redress this asymmetry and explicitly to integrate the contribution of the humanities and of cultural and literary studies into the research and teaching in this emergent interdisciplinary field. Considering the significance of this debate, it is astonishing how long it took before the topic of sustainability found serious attention in the humanities When I started writing the book on Sustainable Texts a couple of years ago, very few articles existed on the subject, which ranged from skepticism towards the concept as an empty managerial slogan to the postulate that “we scholars of literary and cultural studies need to claim our stake in sustainability” 21 - a postulate, however, that was not systematically pursued until very recently A new landmark contribution is the volume Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl. It is the first major publication which emphasises the importance of the cultural dimension of sustainability - as distinct from the established official three pillars of sustainability, the economic, ecological, and social pillars - and thereby highlights the inevitable role of ethical values, of environmental justice, of cultural memory, of the sociocultural meanings of what constitutes ‘the good life,’ but also of the potential role of literature and 20 Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” Report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, 04 August 1987, http: / / www un-documents net/ wced-ocf htm, n p 21 Stephanie LeMenager/ Stephanie Foote, “The Sustainable Humanities,” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 577 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 269 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 artistic creativity in the sustainability discourse 22 Another recent hallmark contribution to the field of sustainability studies from an interdisciplinary perspective is Ursula Kluwick’s and Evi Zemanek’s volume of collected essays Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär: Konzepte, Diskurse, Praktiken, which contains chapters from twenty-one different disciplines on the subject, including ethics, education, cultural studies, plant studies, literary studies, journalism, and media studies 23 One earlier study in the field of art history that should likewise be mentioned here is Sacha Kagan’s substantive book on Art and Sustainability, which resonates with cultural ecology by employing Bateson’s ecology of mind, together with systems and complexity theory, for an assessment of artistic sustainability primarily in the visual arts Aesthetic forms of communication represent a special potential as a sustainable cultural practice because of their “heightened sensibility” for the connectivity and complexity of the natural as well as the cultural world 24 The relationship between literature and sustainability is specifically addressed in the volume Literature and Sustainability 25 The book takes as its starting point the widespread criticism of the concept in literary and cultural studies - the danger of its economic co-option, or simplified ideas of permanence and stability - and posits the plurality of conflicting approaches as the basis of what the editors call ‘critical sustainability ’ Literature can help undermine entrenched anthropocentric concepts and foster sensitivity for the nonhuman, but also explore moral-ethical options of agency by its playful testing out of possible future scenarios Such contributions substantiate Lynn Keller’s contention that “the arts and the human imagination deployed by the arts have significant roles to play” if, as she puts it, “popular ideas of sustainability are to be reclaimed from the blurry, feel-good realm of corporate advertising and given meaningful, hard edges ” 26 In the volume, John Parham’s reconstruction of the history of literary sustainability, with a special focus on nineteenth-century literature and culture, is of special interest to a cultural-ecological conception of sustainability 27 Build- 22 Torsten Meireis/ Gabriele Rippl, eds , Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences (London et al : Routledge, 2019) 23 Ursula Kluwick/ Evi Zemanek, eds , Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär: Konzepte, Diskurse, Praktiken (Wien et al : UTB Böhlau, 2019) 24 Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011) 25 Adeline Johns-Putra/ John Parham/ Louise Squire, eds , Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017) 26 Lynn Keller, “Imagining Beyond, Beyond Imagining,” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 581 27 John Parham, “Sustenance From the Past: Precedents to Sustainability in Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture ” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire, 2017, 33-51 270 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 ing on Ulrich Grober’s cultural history of sustainability, Parham traces the emergence of literary sustainability in a transcultural assessment of proto-ecological thought in Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe as well as in Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Hopkins Inspired by Linnaeus’ The Oeconomy of Nature (1749), their conception of sustainability was founded on a paradigm that, “contrary to the ‘death of nature,’ emphasized the energy, complexity, and autonomy (from humans) of nature.” (34) Goethe is a central figure in this history, whose thought and writing illustrate the three characteristic elements in this emergent conception of sustainability. The first is recognition of the independent agency of nonhuman nature as a complex force field of relationships that these writers considered a source of their poetic creativity The second element concerns the ways in which human activity as expressed in economy, society, and culture “answers to a nature unceasingly dynamic and turbulent ” (35) The third element involves anxiety about how the changes brought about by science, industry, and modernity have produced anxieties and a sense of crisis in our relationship to the environment, but also have provoked reflection on “practical solutions by which we might sustain human being” in the face of this crisis (36) These three elements also provide a model from which Parham describes the sustainability of texts, taking as his example Emile Zola’s novel La Terre, in which Zola, in his own words, aims to render the “living poem of the Earth … in human terms” (Zola qtd in Parham 45): [I]n La Terre, Zola acknowledges and explores nature and the environment as an agential living force; translates this into a corresponding examination of how humans could exist and sustain themselves within ceaselessly shifting, emergent environments; and encapsulates anxieties contained within discourses around sustainability (45) As Parham argues, sustainability involves as a crucial component the assumption of an interior dimension, an Innenwelt reminding of Peter Finke’s cultural ecosystems, that accounts not only for the agency of nonhuman nature but for the co-agency of the mind and the imagination in the human relation to the nonhuman world This is expressed in the concept of ambiance, which redefines the environment not as a deterministic milieu but instead reflects a fundamental dialectic of sustainability “between environmental determinism and human agency ” (39) Parham combines historical with formal aspects in the ways he looks at the sustainability of texts, which he sees exemplified in romantic poems or naturalist novels but also in literary experiments such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “poetic embodiment, via the deployment of a Subsequent quotations from this work are referenced in parentheses in the text 271 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival stress-based ‘sprung rhythm,’ of ecological relations structured by energy exchange ” (35) Contributions like these concur with the argument of cultural ecology that literature and art can significantly contribute to a complex, self-reflexive, and ethically responsive concept of sustainability. This concept of literary sustainability is by no means opposed to innovation and creativity as such, which are often solely ascribed to the natural and technological sciences While it helps to overcome currently prevalent short-term, instrumental, and profit-driven forms of economic and scientific innovation, it involves an alternative notion of creativity oriented on the long-term survival of cultural and natural ecosystems as interdependent realities enabling the continuation of life on the planet Similar ideas are concisely formulated in a short piece by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, his “Foreword” to the volume just mentioned 28 What distinguishes Wood’s from other approaches is that he shifts the argument from the level of theme to the levels of form, language, and the aesthetic Wood considers the text as a linguistic artefact, which is not primarily characterised by the representation of discursive content but by autopoietic, always emergent complexity and which gains the features of what he calls an “idea model” of an ecological system precisely through this aesthetic quality Complexity is what defines the literary and connects it to ecology. “Complexity is an ecological measure, and the measure of literariness in a text ” 29 Literature is self-sustaining and intrinsically ecological by enacting its self-organisation in the precarious tension between order and chaos, emergence and entropy Driven by a biophilic energy, literature “captures essential characteristics of the infinitely complex human-nature dialectic over time ” 30 Wood shows this in a poem by Robert Frost, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things ” A burnt-down farmhouse, which is meanwhile inhabited by birds and plants, serves as a symbolic site for Frost’s exploration of sustainable knowledge (indicated by “the need to be versed in”), which is transmitted in poetic form (the “verse” of the poem) Avoiding both a harmonic-romanticising and an ironic-nihilistic stance, Frost’s poem captures the complex interactivity of the human and the nonhuman world, of order and chaos, destruction and regeneration, which in its reflexive staging constitutes the ecological structure of the text. The knowledge which the poem supplies is not abstract but concrete, it “enacts life, its own coming-into-being, together with the sense of an ending ” 31 Literature provides a specific form of knowledge of life, which becomes sustainable 28 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Foreword,” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire, 2017, xii-xv 29 Ibid , xiii; see also xii 30 Ibid , xiv 31 Ibid , xii 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 272 h ubert z apF through its aesthetic dimension: “[I]t must take on a beautiful shape to be sustainable ” 32 This is no stable, harmonious concept of the aesthetic but includes chaos, contingency, and the “always tenuous resilience of natural forms,” 33 which turns literature itself into a force of cultural survival that continuously reinvents itself in the ever new interpretation of ever new generations of readers It thereby shows the resilience that it stages in its imaginative worlds: “what better model of survival than literature, which enacts the resilience of all life worth the name? ” 34 This concept of literary sustainability therefore also applies to texts which do not primarily follow an environmentalist agenda but which, as aesthetic texts, inhabit their own “niche” in the cultural evolution, a niche cultivating openness to the nonhuman, but also a niche for the survival of the human in a posthuman world - “a niche, not a grave,” as Wood emphasises 35 With this, he argues against a complete dissolution of the human into the posthuman as propagated in some quarters of the Environmental Humanities, since indeed thinking sustainability without the assumption of a conscious, creative, ethically responsive agency of the human is not possible Wood’s “Foreword” is a short but insightful contribution to the debate, even though the emphasis on the single text as an autopoietic ecological system needs to be extended in a cultural-ecological view to the historical-cultural conditions to which the texts respond, as well as to the intertextual field of the literary evolution from whose generative matrix they emerge Let me summarise: The concept of sustainability is intrinsically related to questions of survival, both of the human species and of the global ecosystem Literature is a form of sustainable cultural practice which contributes aesthetic complexity, multiperspectivity, deep-time memory of culture-nature co-evolution, and ethical sensitivity to processes of cultural self-reflection and self-renewal In its radical search for resilient practices and for the traces of what constitutes the ‘good life’ even in the most traumatic conditions, literary texts are an intensely ethical medium of cultural critique and self-reflection, which at the same time becomes a source of renewable creative energy in culture by transforming historical traumas into forms of aesthetic experience that can be shared by ever new generations of readers 32 Ibid , xiv 33 Ibid 34 Ibid , xv 35 Ibid , xiv Works Cited Atwood, Margaret MaddAddam. London/ New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 --- The Year of the Flood. New York: Nan A Talese/ Doubleday, 2009 --- Oryx and Crake. London: Virago Press, 2003 Bateson, Gregory Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind London: Paladin, 1973 Bayer, Anja/ Daniela Seel, eds All dies, Majestät, ist Deins: Lyrik im Anthropozän Berlin: kookbooks, 2016 Brundtland Report “Our Common Future ” Report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development 04 August 1987, www un-documents net/ wced-ocf htm Accessed 26 February 2020 Damasio, Antonio The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness New York: Mariner Books, 2010 Easterlin, Nancy A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012 --- “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind ” New Literary History 44 4 (2013), 661-682 Finke, Peter “Kulturökologie ” Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften Eds Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, 248-279 --- “Die evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur ” Anglia 124 1 (2006), 175-217 Iser, Wolfgang The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. 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