Abstract
Starting with the analysis of a contemporary NZ artwork that is read through the lens of material ecocriticism, Cecilia Novero unpacks some of the new tendencies and theories in this interdisciplinary field, and focuses on the ways in which these have been appropriated, morphed and newly developed in German-speaking cultures. The essay highlights both the challenges and the new inspiring visions that have emerged in this ‘open’ research field in which the long-standing question of “mediation” — between text and world, narrative and matter—returns, albeit from a radically different, indeed “capsized”, perspective. This is the perspective of a world that stories, while it is storied, through material narrative processes of entanglement, where writing and reading, producing and consuming are inextricably linked acts. This introduction frames the following contributions within the larger framework of material ecocriticism. At the same time it retraces their particular debt to and impact on the German-speaking traditions of environmentalist critique.