• An Ecological Messiah?: Reading Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Through the Theory of the Marvelous and Timothy Morton’s Concept of Agrilogistics

    Author(s):
    Guillermo Guadarrama Mendoza (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Subject(s):
    Ecocriticism, Animated films, Sutajio Jiburi, Kabushiki Kaisha, Miyazaki, Hayao, 1941-, Marvelous, The, in literature, Fantasy fiction, Science fiction, Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Miyazaki, Hayao)
    Item Type:
    Conference paper
    Conf. Title:
    2021 Virtual Conference - Emergence/y
    Conf. Org.:
    Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)
    Conf. Loc.:
    On line
    Conf. Date:
    July 26 - August 6
    Tag(s):
    Ecocriticism, Dark Ecology, Anime, Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki, Marvelous Literature, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/8y6q-bs20
    Abstract:
    This conference explores Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from the perspective of Timothy Morton’s dark ecology, specifically through the concept of agrilogistics, as well as from Omar Nieto and Juan Pablo Morales Trigueros’ theories of the fantastic and the marvelous literatures. While a synthesis of these two theories enables a deep comprehension of how the human and non-human worlds are codified in the film’s narrative, Morton’s dark ecology allows us to read such worlds from an ecocritical perspective. Miyazaki’s world-famous anime film has been often read as a pro-environmentalist narrative as the main character Nausicaä achieves the reconciliation between the human world represented by the Valley of the Wind, and the non-human world represented by the toxic fukai. However, this conference explores whether the film actually presents an ecological alternative of coexistence between humans and non-humans, or if it rather represents a reestablishment of the human normal world, maintaining thus the boundaries between them. First a theory of the marvelous as a textual system is developed departing from Nieto’s general theory of the fantastic and Morales Trigueros’ category of the marvelous. Then, this theory is deployed to analyze the way in which the ordinary and the extraordinary are codified in the film. Afterwards, Morton’s dark ecology concepts associated to agrilogistics are applied to develop an ecocritical analysis. In the last section, conclusions are presented.
    Metadata:
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    1 year ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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