Narratives of the Anthropocene in Literature and Science: Themes, Structures and Poetics
Final Report Abstract
The research project aimed at investigating the Anthropocene as an interdisciplinary bridging concept, as a reflexive concept, and as a narrative construct that acts back upon the academic debate. It pursued three goals: 1. integrating the Anthropocene concept into the Ecocriticism approach; 2. exploring non- anthropocentric narratives in science and literature; 3. drafting an outline of a poetics of the Anthropo- cene. – As a first step, five narratives of the Anthropocene were identified in scientific and journalistic publications: the disaster narrative, the court narrative, the narrative of the ‘great transformation’, the (bio-)technological narrative and the narrative of an interdependent nature-culture. These narratives articulate divergent political, economic, ethical, and ecological interests. Their distinction also serves to critically reflect on the position of human supremacy over nature and on established epistemo- logical categories (e.g., subject-object dualism). The predominantly Western Anthropocene concept was further differentiated from the perspective of postcolonial studies and the Environmental Humanities. Another result of the project is that the Anthropocene discourse, which has become increasingly interdisciplinary in the last decade, demands that discussions of the new Earth age should neither be limited to specific media nor to the theories and reflections of one academic discipline. The volume Anthropocenic Turn (2020), published by Routledge, provides an inventory of the cross-disciplinary changes brought about by the integration of the Anthropocene concept into each respective disciplinary context. In a next step, it became apparent that the three thematic aspects of the Anthrop- ocene discourse – the planetary perspective, the large-scale time dimension, and the nature-culture interactions – must be understood as scale problems which challenge the imagination. Anthropocene phenomena such as climate change, in their multi-scale, spatially and temporally disparate distribution and complexity, defy conventional forms of human imagination and necessitate finding alternative ways of articulating such highly complex entanglements between humans and the environment. The international conference at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin on “Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene” (09/2019) posed the question of how to narrate and communicate such complex scalar interrelationships through different narrative forms; the results will be published by Routledge in an edited volume under the same title in 2021. It was only against the backdrop of these theoretical and interdisciplinary findings that the project’s original question of a possible poetics of the Anthropocene could be addressed. For literary studies, the project developed a distinction between ‘Anthropocene literature’ and ‘Anthropocene readings’. In the first perspective, significant features include: an existential irritation and an unsettled relation- ship between humans and nature/earth system; a narrative of interconnectedness expressed through linguistic ambiguities and ambivalent meanings; the representation of a ‘derangement of scale’ (Clark 2015) in temporal and spatial terms; the use of strategic anthropocentrism, decentralization of humans, and the ascription of agency to the non-human world. In the second perspective, an ecological earth-historical, recontextualizing anthropocenic reading of literary texts, the Anthropocene is recognized as a geo-historical context that not only transcends human-social interactions and incorporates planetary material flows, but also sets into motion a self-reflection of variegated actors on their ecological responsibilities. The edited volume Anthropocene Literature. Poetics – Themes – Readings, published by Metzler (2021), presents these results.
Publications
- (2018): „Narrative des Anthropozän – Systematisierung eines interdisziplinären Diskurses“. In: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 2.1 (2018), S. 1-20
Dürbeck, Gabriele
(See online at https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2018-0001) - (2019): „Narratives of the Anthropocene from the Perspective of Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities“. In: Monika Albrecht (Hg.): Postcolonialism Cross-Examined. Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present. New York/London: Routledge, S. 271-288
Dürbeck, Gabriele
- Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien / Representations of the Anthropocene in Literature and Media. Frankfurt a.M. u.a.: Peter Lang 2019 (Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Umwelt, 5
Dürbeck, Gabriele und Jonas Nesselhauf (Hg.)
- (2020): The Anthropocenic Turn. The Interplay Between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. London/New York: Routledge
Dürbeck, Gabriele/Hüpkes, Philip (Hg.)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003037620) - (2020): „Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem“. In: Bajohr, Hannes (Hg.): Der Anthropos im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung. Berlin: de Gruyter, S. 115-130
Philip Hüpkes
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668551-007) - “Extinction and Resurrection: The Anthropocene in Silke Scheuermann’s Poems ‘The Extinct’ and ‘Second Creation’”. In: Gegenwartsliteratur/A German Studies Yearbook (2020), S. 99-121
Dürbeck, Gabriele
