Tintti Klapuri1; 1 University of Helsinki, Finland
Discussion
This presentation discusses how ecocentrism is constructed in Kola Sámi poetry, with a particular focus on tropes that connect the human with the nonhuman and vice versa, such as personification and its inversion, in Ter Sámi poet Oktiabrina Voronova’s (1934-1990) work written in the 1980s. Theoretically the presentation draws from ecocritical discussions on the diverse meanings that figures of speech may acquire in the construction of nature relations in a literary text (Bryan L. Moore 2008, Scott Knickerbocker 2012). While the previous (very scant) research into Voronova’s work mainly examines its mythological and folkloric roots in the indigenous context (Viktoriia Bakula 2020), I aim at introducing her oeuvre to literary studies, aware of the fact that tropes linking the human with the nonhuman have a long literary tradition and that they do not self-evidently create discourses that may be considered ecocentric.