2 - Creature Comforts: Economadism in the Work of Dorothea Grünzweig

Summary

I want to run with the she-wolves against the gravitational pull of the humanization and hence the commodification of all that lives.

— Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions

Poetry is the song of the earth.

— Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth

Greening Nomadism

Strange subjects trouble postmodernist notions of disembodied, free-floating individuals and masculinist models of knowledge production. They also challenge anthropocentric accounts of the world, opening up space for human/nonhuman connections and for “creature comforts,” a term to which I will return. In this chapter, I explore the intersection of nomadism with green thought, specifically with ecofeminism, and argue that the poetry of Dorothea Grünzweig enacts an “economadic” challenge to rapacious global capitalism. Such a challenge is urgent in light of the widely acknowledged, ongoing destruction of the natural environment by humans, or “the impending extinction of our biosphere.”

Dorothea Grünzweig was born in 1952 in Korntal near Stuttgart. She studied German and English in Tübingen and Bangor, Wales, following which she conducted research on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in Oxford. After teaching at the University of Dundee and at a boarding school in South Germany, she moved to Finland, where she taught at the German School in Helsinki from 1989 to 1998. She now lives in Helsinki and in the country. Her collections are: Mittsommerschnitt (1997; Midsummer Cut, 2002), Vom Eisgebreit (From the icefield, 2000), Glasstimmen lasinäänet (2004; Glass Voices lasinäänet, 2008), for which she won the Christian Wagner Prize, and Die Auflösung (The clearing, 2008).