Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
18th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, ss.233, (Özet Bildiri)
This paper offers a Latourian ecocritical reinterpretation of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, proposing that the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd can be understood not as a static notion of fate but as a dynamic network of human and non-human actants that collectively shape the elegiac subject’s existence. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and his critique of the modern separation between nature and culture, the study argues that early medievalAnglo-Saxon poetry already envisions subjectivity as relational, contingent, and distributed across ecological forces rather than rooted in an autonomous interior self. In this framework, environmental elements traditionally approached as symbolic; frost, storm, sea, winter darkness, desolate landscapes, are repositioned as active participants in the production of experience, exerting agency that compels, restrains, or transforms the narrator’s emotional and existential trajectory. Through this lens, wyrd emerges as an early articulation of a networked ontology, one in which human life is continuously co-constituted by the material and elemental world. Such a reading not only reveals the intricate ecological consciousness embedded within The Wanderer and The Seafarer but also aligns Anglo-Saxon elegy with contemporary debates in ecocriticism and posthumanism, challenging assumptions that medieval literature is governed by theological determinism. Instead, the elegies appear as sophisticated reflections on environmental agency, distributed subjectivity, and the entanglement of human and non-human forces within an interconnected world, offering a premodern counterpart to Latour’s reimagining of agency beyond the human.