Hope in the margins: Simon Stephens’s post-anthropocentric reconfigurations in Herons, Punk Rock, Wastwater, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Date

2026-2-17

Author

Özoltulular, Muammer

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Writing amid the 21st-century financial, political, and environmental crises, Simon Stephens portrays a human-centred, dark, and brutal world. Alongside this anthropogenic bleakness, marginal spaces within his dramaturgy make the post-anthropocentric echoes of ecological and ethical hope audible. While current scholarship on Stephens notes this tension between hope and despair, it does not explain how the plays tend towards hope. Maintaining ties to social realism and naturalism, which are often seen as complicit in anthropocentrism, Stephens’s plays problematise anthropocentrism from within by destabilising human exceptionalism and Cartesian binary oppositions between humans and wider-than-human world, matter and culture, and self and other. This dissertation explores how Stephens’s dramaturgy creates a relational and ethical view of reality, responding to the climate-crisis-related onto-epistemological crisis in the 21st century, in Herons (2001), Punk Rock (2009), Wastwater (2011), and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012). Each of these plays provides significant narrative weight on environmental issues, whose marginal status is still preserved. Interpreting references to animate and inanimate beings and their narrative significance in Stephens’s plays through a post-anthropocentric hermeneutical lens, against the conceptual background of Karen Barad’s “entanglement,” Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer’s “hyposubjects,” and Jane Bennett’s “isomorphism,” this study reveals that the playwright’s reflection of reality observed in the margins of his texts is relational and tends toward hope. I claim that the relational view is evident in his resistance to rigid divisions between humans and wider-than-human becomings, matter and culture, content and form, and self-centred subjectivities, as well as interspecies ignorance. In such a context, I argue that Stephens’s plays present a sense of reality in which meaning and matter are entangled, non-transcendental subjectivities of the Anthropocene emerge, and cross-species empathy becomes attainable.

Subject Keywords

Stephens, more-than-naturalism, entanglement, hyposubjects, cross-species empathy, ecological hope

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118734

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis