Katrin Pesch

This chapter analyses how geographic modes of telling in Deborah Stratman's film The Illinois Parables (2016) unmoor the essay film from its anthropocentric bearings. Rather than reading the essay as a form of subjective expression, as is often the case, I argue that Stratman's film embraces a mode of telling that includes human and non-human voices alike, thus shifting the focus from individual subjectivity to a distributed form of agency. Looking at the film through a new materialist lens allows me to show how The Illinois Parables moves the essay's alleged humanism toward an understanding of a posthumanist essay.