Texturas de vida

territórios sonoros e naturocultura em deriva pelos "Kew Gardens"

Abstract

This article presents a reading of the short story “Kew Gardens” (1919), written by English author Virginia Woolf, taking into account assumptions from sound studies, literary criticism, and environmental humanities. Firstly, it is argued that the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, botanical and mycological gardens in London that give the story its name and date back to British colonial and imperialist expeditions, appear as a historical stage for social experiments and, through their fictionalization in Woolf's hands, literary ones. This work assumes, supported by Haraway (2008) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2010), that Woolf's narrator edits the representation of a natureculture of the early decades of the twentieth century by juxtaposing living beings with the noisy industrial presence of human machinery without distinction, through a moving narrative perspective that brings together and distances drifting strollers from the non-human inhabitants who live there. Finally, we propose an analysis of the formal construction of the fictional text through close reading of excerpts with the support of media archaeology concepts by Ernst (2016) and Kittler (2019) based on the notions of polytextural sounds and literature, by Cuddy-Keane (2000), and performative territories, by Despret (2022).