Nice Ice: An Eco-postmodern Exploration of Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth

Authors

Keywords:

Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth, Arctic, postmodern ecocriticism, global warming, climate change, interconnectedness, Inuit

Abstract

In this paper, I approach Tanya Tagaq’s Arctic novel Split Tooth (2018) from the perspectives of postmodern ecocriticism. I study how the novel provides readers with an opportunity to ponder on the constantly shifting and mutating ecosystems of the Arctic, while exposing human centeredness and sovereignty to decide over nature. Through a close reading of the novel, I explore a number of metanarratives, including age-old imaginations of the Arctic, and examine the ways that Tagaq employs to raise incredulity toward such established mediated assumptions of the circumpolar world. I also show how the text informs readers of indigenous peoples’ mininarratives with its revisionist accounts and challenges the monolithic conceptualization of Arctic identity. Moreover, I examine the peripheral positions of nonhuman species living in the Arctic and show how the novelist makes her text a space of alliance between human and other-than-human.

Author Biography

Mehdi Ghasemi, University of Turku University of Tampere

Mehdi Ghasemi is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English at the University of Turku and a senior researcher at the University of Tampere, Finland. He is also a fiction writer, writing his books in the hybrid genre of “noveramatry” (a combination of novel, drama and poetry). He has already published six scholarly books, four fiction books, one literary anthology, and more than twenty scholarly papers in peer-reviewed, high-quality journals, including Orbis Litterarum, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Literary Studies, European Journal of American Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, SAGE Open, Immigrant and Minorities, The CEA Critic and Contemporary Aesthetics.

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Published

2023-08-28

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2023)

Section

Articles

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