9:14 a.m.
Dear all,
this is just a (late!!) reminder about today’s zoom-presentation that has clear
environmental correlations! - info here:
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Welcome to next week’s IMS seminar with Asun López-Varela, titled “Intermedial Semiosis
and the Agency of Attention: “Serious Noticing” in the Eco-Poetry of Kathleen Jamie”. The
seminar will take place on Wednesday the 4th of February, 10.15-12.00, in room Dacke and
on zoom: https://lnu-se.zoom.us/j/61066906240?pwd=RjgAgFEaHu7bPTOSzC7nyK3nYDXayL.1
Abstract
Contemporary ecopoetry has increasingly challenged anthropocentric conceptions of
perception, creativity, and agency by foregrounding the relational entanglement of
language, matter, and environment. Rather than treating poetic expression as the
projection of a sovereign human consciousness onto a passive landscape, recent work within
intermedial and semiotic theory invites us to understand poetic form as emerging from
dynamic exchanges among heterogeneous material supports—bodily perception, inscriptional
practices, environmental processes, and cultural memory. This article proposes a
theoretical account of Kathleen Jamie’s eco-poetry through the lens of Charles S. Peirce’s
semiotics and the intermedial aesthetics, arguing that poetic “noticing” functions as a
distributed semiotic practice rather than a purely subjective act of observation.
Drawing on Peirce’s triadic model of the sign and his phenomenological categories of
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, the study conceptualises Jamie’s poetics as a field
in which sensation, encounter, and habit converge to produce meaning across human and
more-than-human agencies. Intermediality is thus understood not merely as the combination
of verbal and visual forms, but as a process of transduction in which wind, stone, tide,
birdcall, and inscription co-participate in signification. Language becomes one medium
among others within a broader ecological semiosis.
Central to this account is Jamie’s practice of “serious noticing,” which the article
interprets as an ethical and aesthetic mode of attention that redistributes agency away
from the observing subject toward the relational event itself. Noticing operates as a form
of interpretant activity: it mediates between material presence and symbolic articulation,
allowing the poem to emerge as the trace of an encounter rather than an imposition of
mastery. Through close readings of selected poems, the paper demonstrates how Jamie’s work
enacts a non-anthropocentric poetics in which perception becomes participatory, writing
becomes a site of intermedial translation, and the environment asserts its own semiotic
force.
By situating Jamie’s eco-poetry within a Peircean and intermedial framework, the article
ultimately advances a model of literary agency grounded in attentiveness, reciprocity, and
material co-production, proposing “noticing” as both a methodological principle and an
ecological ethics of form.
Bio:
Asun López-Varela is Assoc. Prof. at Facultad Filología, Universidad Complutense de
Madrid<https://www.ucm.es/>. She holds a PhD Anglo-American Culture and Literary
Studies (2002), a Diploma of Advanced PhD Studies in Spanish Literature from UNED (2004),
and a Master in Education Management from the Open University London (2000). Her research
interests are Comparative Literature, Science & Literature, Cultural Studies,
Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics and Green Humanities and Sustainability.
<https://www.ucm.es/siim/eurasia-foundation-complutense-2022-lectures-webinars>