Hilary Cunningham Scharper

Canadian author Hilary Scharper.

Hilary Cunningham Scharper is a novelist and associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Scharper's fiction, academic writing, teaching and research focus on cultural approaches to Nature. Her fiction has been described as Ecogothic:[1] a new and emerging literary genre that builds on elements of traditional Gothic fiction,[2] but highlights human-nature relationships.

Her work

Nature, the Gothic and the Ecogothic

Scharper locates her Ecogothic stories at the "wild edges" or "margins" of both wilderness and urban landscapes, tracing out the complex relationships that characterize human and nonhuman encounters. She explores Gothic nature as places of "yearning" and "refusal"—that is, as places of love and intimacy as well anxiety and estrangement between human and non-human characters. For Scharper, it is in these moments of yielding and love, fear and estrangement that one finds evidence of "biophilia," a quality or force which draws all living things to each other and into contingent inter-relationship. Scharper's fiction therefore explores a wide range of affective relationships in order to challenge simple and objectifying approaches to the natural world.

The setting for "Perdita": storm front over Georgian Bay ...

Scharper's first novel, Perdita,[3] is set at a late 19th-century lighthouse on the Bruce Peninsula in northern Ontario, Canada. (The fictional lighthouse is based on the Cabot Head Light-Station.) For 19-year-old Marged Brice, Nature is both an "other" and "another", i.e., a living, acting, creating Nature "who" is not only capable of influencing events though the creation of weather (one of its main forms of expression), but is also noble, reckless, forgiving and jealous. Marged's nature is therefore not merely a landscape in the traditional sense, but a world of morally-complex players who will sometimes act as background and foreground, but are nevertheless always between, amidst, and enveloping. Marged probes her unique relationship with nature in a series of diaries and these resurface in the 21st century to complicate the world of a historian who is on a mission to find the oldest living people on the planet. A ghostly, gothic hybrid—the figure of a lost child or a "Perdita"—ultimately brings the two time periods together.

Fin-de-Cene and the Anthropocene

The Ecogothic is also a fin-de-cene—rather than a fin-de-siècle—literary genre. While literary scholars have often noted the Gothic's association with crises in social identity (especially those occurring during the transition from one century to the next),[4] Scharper has suggested that—ecologically-speaking—it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning from one geological epoch to the next. As we shift from the current Holocene to an Anthropocene (i.e., an era in which human activities have a primary and extensive impact on the earth's systems), the Ecogothic is relevant to a society facing the need to forge more intimate, imaginative and sustainable relationships with Nature. In this respect, she joins ecocritics and literary scholars Andrew Smith and William Hughes in their efforts to situate the Ecogothic" at the intersection of "literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process".[5]

Biophilia

In her first novel, Perdita, Scharper adapted E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis. Perdita ("the lost one") is a mythological figure, an illicit child born to Hephaestus and Pandora. She is hidden away among the Three Fates where she is given the task of gathering up the "lost threads of life." It is here that she acquires four different kinds of love: friendship (philia), erotic love (eros), unselfish love (agape), and the love between humans and the natural world (biophilia). Perdita is eventually given to Prometheus who promises to conceal her among humankind. Perdita brings with her the four loves in a doll-like bundle made up of "lost threads." Along with Prometheus' gift of fire, Perdita's four loves are given to humankind. In the mythological version, humans seize upon fire and begin to use it, but they neglect and eventually abandon Perdita after accepting only three of her threads. The fourth love, biophilia, is thus lost to the Western tradition—but can always be rediscovered and can hence rescued in the present.

Research

Hilary Scharper is also a professor of cultural anthropology. She teaches in the areas of anthrozoology (anthropology of animals), critical border studies, political ecology and posthumanism. Her academic work explores boundary-making as itself a multi-faceted encounter with "nature"—one which ultimately generates certain types of human-nature interactions while excluding or marginalizing other kinds. Because "borders" can encompass physical spaces, metaphysical categories, ecological zones, as well as human and non-human actors, Hilary focuses on "nature" itself as a kind of borderscape. To probe notions of "nature" and the "natural," then—whether at an international border wall, in a philosophical discussion of what it means to be human, or in a literary form such as a novel—is to critically question acts of enclosure, crossings and mobilities.

Selected works

Fiction

Non-fiction

References

  1. ↑ "The Eco-Gothic"
  2. ↑ "Gothic Novel"
  3. ↑ Perdita
  4. ↑ "Introduction." Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Roger Luckhurst, ed. Oxford World Classics. 2009.
  5. ↑ "Ecogothic." Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Manchester University Press, 2013.

External links

  1. ↑ University of Toronto Anthropology Department
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