Il margine vivo. Per un’analisi ecocritica dell’oggettualità nella poesia di Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The aim of this contribution is to investigate the presence of a poetics of the “hyperobject” in the work of the German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, with particular reference to her cycle of poems Haidebilder (1842). Through reference to the concept of hyperobject coined by Timothy Morton (Morton 2013), and to the literary perspectives on the “agency of matter” disclosed by Material ecocriticism (Iovino/Oppermann 2014), an attempt will be made to understand Annette von Droste’s nature poetry as an example of a creative process in which the objects of nature are presented as hyperobjects, and characterised by an uncanny agency. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s poetics of the hyperobject manifests itself at its best in the Haidebilder cycle of poems, where the poet interweaves the subjective crossing of the Westphalian landscape by the lyrical I—significantly male—with the mythical-magical imposition of a geological and elemental nature. In analysing two of the topographical “pictures” proposed by the poet, the multiple functions that the object as hyperobject ends up assuming in the texts will be identified: from that of vector of the creative and poetic process, to that of symbol of the magical-pagan and ever mysterious element of geological nature, to that of catalyst of scientific discourse and Christian discourse on nature.