ABSTRACT
Horzum reads Griffith’s novel from material-feminist and material-ecocritical perspectives, highlighting how Ammonite is conducive to a contemporary posthumanist worldview. The author argues that the novel demonstrates the intertwined nature of human and viral bodies through its critique of androcentrism, often equated with anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment ‘Man.’ Horzum’s analysis illustrates how Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, Margaret Price’s bodymind, and Başak Ağın’s mattertext are always already enmeshed within one another, with examples from the text and with supports from the recent theoretical intersections of environmental humanities and posthumanities. Reading Marghe, the protagonist of the novel, as a posthuman subject who undergoes symbiotic experiences with the nonhuman and the planet, Horzum contends that the entangled bodies of the woman, the Jeep virus, and the planet GP unfold as an assemblage presenting an emergent relationality within the narrative. Noting these actors’ involvement in multiple becomings, the author pinpoints the flat ontology on which each actor dwells within an ongoing, dynamic process of narrating and becoming with each of its components. This process, according to Horzum, is one that creates and navigates the entire narrativity and horizontal relationality in Ammonite. This chapter concludes with the author’s indication of a never-ending dynamism where every non/living entity is a vibrant, lively agent.
