Care, Nature & Cultural Disconnection

Care, Nature & Cultural Disconnection

What happens when a culture loses its connection with the forces that sustain life?

What sustains a life and what happens when we cease to notice it?

Care, relationships, environments and the rhythms of growth and decay make our lives possible. Yet stories of independence and progress can leave these dependencies beneath the surface.

This catacomb explores how literature and horror bring them into view, unsettling the boundaries we draw between ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

Inside This Catacomb

Forests, gardens, waters and houses can become more than settings. Through them, a work may question what we cultivate, what we contain and what we attempt to control.

Ecogothic readings offer one way to investigate these relationships. We ask how stories make nature appear threatening, how they represent human vulnerability, and what remains beyond the meanings we assign to the nonhuman world.

Care also belongs within this investigation. Who or what sustains the apparent independence of a person, a household or a community? What happens when that sustaining work becomes invisible, exhausted or taken for granted?

The Great Mother, approached through Jungian thought, offers a symbolic lens for exploring nourishment, containment, creation and destruction. We examine where that lens illuminates a work and where it risks imposing human meanings on lives and environments that exceed it.

Grief threads through these questions: the loss of places, relationships, ways of living and imagined futures. We attend to what stories preserve, what they mourn and what possibilities of change they allow.

Questions We Explore

What dependencies do stories of independence and progress leave unacknowledged?
How do Gothic works unsettle the distinction between cultivated safety and threatening wilderness?
What happens when the people and environments that sustain us are treated as inexhaustible?
How do stories represent loss and transformation beyond the individual human life?

Related Research

Descent into the Great Mother: Grief, Recursion, and the Chthonic Matrix in Dark as a Representation of Modern Hubris and Inner Disconnection.

An essay on the television series Dark, exploring modern hubris, grief and inner disconnection through the chthonic imagination.

This work connects with the catacomb’s questions about dependence, control and the forces that sustain life, approached through a Gothic-Jungian lens.

Manuscript submitted — not yet published.