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Paper short abstract

The paper proposes an ecocritical interpretation of Pulp’s 2001 album “We Love Life”. It aims to analyze the means the album employs to create an eco-centred narrative that dwells on the issue of nature in the urban environment and the various interactions between the human and the non-human world.

Paper long abstract

From their ascension to fame in 1990s with the albums like His’n’Hers (1994) and especially Different Class (1995), Pulp have remained for the past three decades at the very heart of the britpop music scene. Formed and based in Sheffield, the band gave voice to the city's "mistakes, misshapes, misfits", narrating the life of a small industrial town with a minuteness of detail that would lead some critics to compare the band’s leader and lyricist Jarvis Cocker’s ability to poeticize the ordinary and the everyday with that of Seamus Heaney. In 2001, however, the band, “renowned for urban squalor and glamour” (to borrow Darran Anderson’s phrase), delivered an eco-oriented album, titled “We Love Life”. Like Pulp’s previous albums, it continued to focus on the social and the personal, but a theme that was brought to the foreground was the exploration of nature in the urban environment. From the marginal existence of the weeds to the intimacy of the protagonist’s lover’s garden, the album managed to create a multifaceted narrative of both the urban nature and the human lives intertwined with it. With the album’s increasing pertinence in today’s world, the paper, therefore, proposes to analyze the ecopoetics of “We Love Life” and the means the album employs (for instance, its use of folklore, literary, musical and cinematic allusions) to explore the sense of the place, its nature and the various interactions between the human and the non-human world.