Modernist Ecology: Modernism and the Reimagination of Nature

Countering the trend in contemporary ecocriticism to advance realism as an environmentally responsible mode of representation, this essay argues that the anti-realist aesthetics of literary modernism were implicitly “ecological.” In order to make this argument I distinguish between contemporary and modernist ecological culture (both of which I differentiate in turn from ecological science); while the former is concerned primarily with the practical reform characteristic of what we now call “environmentalism,” the latter demanded an all-encompassing reimagination of the relationship between humanity and nature. “Modernist ecology,” as I call it, attempted to envision this change, which would be ontological or metaphysical rather than simply social, through thematically and formally experimental works of art. Its radical vision, suggestive in some ways of today’s “deep” ecology, repudiated modern accounts of nature as a congeries of inert objects to be manipulated by a sovereign subject, and instead foregrounded the chiasmic intertexture of the subject/object relationship. In aesthetic modernism we encounter not “objective” nature, but “nature-being” – a blank substratum beneath the solid contours of what philosopher Kate Soper calls “lay nature” – the revelation of which shatters historical constructions of nature and alone allows for radical alternatives. This essay looks specifically at modernist ecology as it appears in the works of W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett, detailing their attempts to envision revolutionary new ecologies, but also their struggles with the limited capacity of esoteric modernist art to effect significant ecological change on a collective level.

Household debt and the European crisis. ECRI Research Report No. 13, June 2013

The fall in economic output all over Europe since 2008 has had important consequences for household liabilities. Major growth in demand and supply for household credit products has generated an increase in household debt, which contributed to growth rates during the pre-crisis period but – in some countries – became household-debt overhangs and helped inflate asset bubbles. In the run-up to the crisis, long-term economic lessons and theories were often overlooked and signs that the economic situation could worsen were ignored. Although not at the core of the crisis, household debt had important consequences for macroeconomic stability, robustness of growth and the depth of recessions. The last ten years in Europe have demonstrated the typical final stage of a household debt cycle: rapid increase and abrupt retrenchment. Widely varying outcomes across Europe enable us to consider the causes of the rapid growth in household debt and draw theoretical lessons that can help policy-makers and academics devise a coherent regulatory response to avoid extremes of the debt cycle in future.