Papers by Aaron Rosenberg
Ecological Form, 2018
That nature and culture "coproduce" one another-indeed, that "we might instead look at the histor... more That nature and culture "coproduce" one another-indeed, that "we might instead look at the history of modernity as co-produced, all the way through"-is the insight of Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 7, original emphasis. 23. For John Barrell, "Hardy attempts to communicate a notion of. .. [a] primitive [sense of ] geography, as it inheres in its purest form in the consciousness that he attributes. .. to Tess before her marriage." "Geographies of Hardy's Wessex," in
Ecological Form, 2020
1 Two days later, still contemplating the despair amassed in what was then the world's most popul... more 1 Two days later, still contemplating the despair amassed in what was then the world's most populous city, Hardy wrote, "A woeful fact-that the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment." The strain that London's overdeveloped urban environment clearly exerted on Hardy's own "nerves" opens onto a wider lament about the misery of the "human race," which must suffer collectively the biological burden of consciousness. "Even the higher animals are in excess in this respect," he continues, dilating the already immense range of these speculations by questioning "whether Nature, or what we call Nature, so far back when she crossed the line from invertebrates to vertebrates, did not exceed her mission." 2 "This planet," Hardy concludes, "does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences. Other planets may, though one can hardly see how." Hardy's use of the word "excess" refers both to his scientifi c understanding of the world's processes and to an embodied sense of disproportion produced by the enormous measurements of time and space included c h a p t e r 9
Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, 2018
in *Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire*, eds. Nathan Hensley and Philip ... more in *Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire*, eds. Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer, Fordham UP 2018.
Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few mil... more Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles. " —Wells, " The Star "
This essay considers how the representation of deep time affects, and is affected by, literary genres. It takes The Time Machine (1895) as its case study, investigating the ways in which H. G. Wells's work repurposes the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansive temporal scales that exceed the repre-sentational capacity of the realist novel. The essay's overarching suggestion will be that stretching narratives to the extreme longue durée of the geologic epoch necessitates shifting away from realism, opening new possibilities for genres (including melodrama, epic, and, in this case, romance) that the realist tradition had ostensibly superseded. Understanding how the formal expansiveness of genres can be mobilized strategically, I conclude, affords a critical perspective for analyzing the Anthropocene—a concept whose narrative and discursive patterns concern the contemporaneity of deep time and the present and that could itself be construed as a genre. * * * Imagining what the world might look like in the year 802701 seems absurd. The date is unfathomably distant, some 160 times longer than the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history—but this is only the initial stop in Wells's first major work of fiction, The Time Machine. Wells explained that this immense narrative scope was necessary to his purpose of providing " a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind " (Seven ix). The novel envisions a world in which Homo sapiens has diverged into two subspecies—Eloi and Morlocks—a biological process that would realistically take thousands of generations to unfold. Yet the protracted temporality of species change dwarfs the lifespan of an individual to such an extent that for the protagonist to experience it firsthand as an event, or a " glimpse, " the novel must alternately stretch and contract its narrative durée in ways that destabilize its status as a realistic account. Wells's explanation, moreover, hardly justifies the surprising detours that occur toward the end of the story, in which the protagonist is propelled many millions of years forward , into post-and nonhuman time: to an age of weird amphibious blobs; to black seas under a cold sun; to a moment when the Earth stops turning. These latter
"Specters of Totality: The Afterlife of the Nuclear Age" in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criti... more "Specters of Totality: The Afterlife of the Nuclear Age" in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, eds. Michael Blouin, Morgan Shipley, Jack Taylor (Cambridge Scholars, 2013): 45-58.
Conference Presentations by Aaron Rosenberg
Modernist Studies Association, Amsterdam, Aug. 2017.
conference paper for MSA, Pasadena, 2016.
A curious episode occurs in the middle of Conrad’s Lor... more conference paper for MSA, Pasadena, 2016.
A curious episode occurs in the middle of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). After Jim’s disgrace on the Patna, Marlow (who takes it upon himself to be the arbiter of Jim’s uncertain future) is approached by a roguish entrepreneur who proposes to establish Jim as “supreme boss” on a guano island “as good as a goldmine.” While this assignment is intended to seem humiliating, it reminds us that guano was indeed a strategic resource, as significant as gold (Almayer’s Folly), ivory (Heart of Darkness), or silver (Nostromo).
As the world’s major source of nitrogen, the guano trade was critical to industrial agriculture in the colonies and to the manufacture of gunpowder and explosives. In 1909, however, Fritz Haber developed a technological breakthrough whose significance to the 20th century is hard to overstate. His technique for fixing nitrogen directly from the atmosphere—the “Haber Process”—yielded an almost unlimited supply of what had been a scarce resource. The mass-production of nitrogen as a synthetic fertilizer promised a utopian solution for eradicating world hunger, but it also created the unprecedented weaponry that fueled both World Wars.
My talk puts traces a vision of utopian/apocalyptic technoscience through Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. Novels like Wells’s The Food of the Gods (1904) anticipate the radical “change of scale in human affairs,” and the ecological disasters, that accompany such Promethean moments.
The Society for Novel Studies, Pittsburgh, May 2016
Society for the Humanities Annual Fellows Workshop, Ithaca NY, Apr. 2016.
Explaining the Anthropocene (To Each Other): Conversations Across the Disciplines. Monmouth Univ... more Explaining the Anthropocene (To Each Other): Conversations Across the Disciplines. Monmouth University, Apr. 2016.
Modernist Studies Association, Boston, Nov. 2015.
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSAeu), Malta. June 2015.
Modernist Studies Association, Pittsburgh, Nov. 2014.
"Complex TV" UCL graduate discussion series, Feb. 2014.
American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, Apr. 2013
Northeast conference of the Modern Language Association, Boston, Mar. 2013
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Papers by Aaron Rosenberg
This essay considers how the representation of deep time affects, and is affected by, literary genres. It takes The Time Machine (1895) as its case study, investigating the ways in which H. G. Wells's work repurposes the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansive temporal scales that exceed the repre-sentational capacity of the realist novel. The essay's overarching suggestion will be that stretching narratives to the extreme longue durée of the geologic epoch necessitates shifting away from realism, opening new possibilities for genres (including melodrama, epic, and, in this case, romance) that the realist tradition had ostensibly superseded. Understanding how the formal expansiveness of genres can be mobilized strategically, I conclude, affords a critical perspective for analyzing the Anthropocene—a concept whose narrative and discursive patterns concern the contemporaneity of deep time and the present and that could itself be construed as a genre. * * * Imagining what the world might look like in the year 802701 seems absurd. The date is unfathomably distant, some 160 times longer than the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history—but this is only the initial stop in Wells's first major work of fiction, The Time Machine. Wells explained that this immense narrative scope was necessary to his purpose of providing " a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind " (Seven ix). The novel envisions a world in which Homo sapiens has diverged into two subspecies—Eloi and Morlocks—a biological process that would realistically take thousands of generations to unfold. Yet the protracted temporality of species change dwarfs the lifespan of an individual to such an extent that for the protagonist to experience it firsthand as an event, or a " glimpse, " the novel must alternately stretch and contract its narrative durée in ways that destabilize its status as a realistic account. Wells's explanation, moreover, hardly justifies the surprising detours that occur toward the end of the story, in which the protagonist is propelled many millions of years forward , into post-and nonhuman time: to an age of weird amphibious blobs; to black seas under a cold sun; to a moment when the Earth stops turning. These latter
Conference Presentations by Aaron Rosenberg
A curious episode occurs in the middle of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). After Jim’s disgrace on the Patna, Marlow (who takes it upon himself to be the arbiter of Jim’s uncertain future) is approached by a roguish entrepreneur who proposes to establish Jim as “supreme boss” on a guano island “as good as a goldmine.” While this assignment is intended to seem humiliating, it reminds us that guano was indeed a strategic resource, as significant as gold (Almayer’s Folly), ivory (Heart of Darkness), or silver (Nostromo).
As the world’s major source of nitrogen, the guano trade was critical to industrial agriculture in the colonies and to the manufacture of gunpowder and explosives. In 1909, however, Fritz Haber developed a technological breakthrough whose significance to the 20th century is hard to overstate. His technique for fixing nitrogen directly from the atmosphere—the “Haber Process”—yielded an almost unlimited supply of what had been a scarce resource. The mass-production of nitrogen as a synthetic fertilizer promised a utopian solution for eradicating world hunger, but it also created the unprecedented weaponry that fueled both World Wars.
My talk puts traces a vision of utopian/apocalyptic technoscience through Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. Novels like Wells’s The Food of the Gods (1904) anticipate the radical “change of scale in human affairs,” and the ecological disasters, that accompany such Promethean moments.
This essay considers how the representation of deep time affects, and is affected by, literary genres. It takes The Time Machine (1895) as its case study, investigating the ways in which H. G. Wells's work repurposes the conventions of the romance genre as a means of narrating expansive temporal scales that exceed the repre-sentational capacity of the realist novel. The essay's overarching suggestion will be that stretching narratives to the extreme longue durée of the geologic epoch necessitates shifting away from realism, opening new possibilities for genres (including melodrama, epic, and, in this case, romance) that the realist tradition had ostensibly superseded. Understanding how the formal expansiveness of genres can be mobilized strategically, I conclude, affords a critical perspective for analyzing the Anthropocene—a concept whose narrative and discursive patterns concern the contemporaneity of deep time and the present and that could itself be construed as a genre. * * * Imagining what the world might look like in the year 802701 seems absurd. The date is unfathomably distant, some 160 times longer than the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history—but this is only the initial stop in Wells's first major work of fiction, The Time Machine. Wells explained that this immense narrative scope was necessary to his purpose of providing " a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind " (Seven ix). The novel envisions a world in which Homo sapiens has diverged into two subspecies—Eloi and Morlocks—a biological process that would realistically take thousands of generations to unfold. Yet the protracted temporality of species change dwarfs the lifespan of an individual to such an extent that for the protagonist to experience it firsthand as an event, or a " glimpse, " the novel must alternately stretch and contract its narrative durée in ways that destabilize its status as a realistic account. Wells's explanation, moreover, hardly justifies the surprising detours that occur toward the end of the story, in which the protagonist is propelled many millions of years forward , into post-and nonhuman time: to an age of weird amphibious blobs; to black seas under a cold sun; to a moment when the Earth stops turning. These latter
A curious episode occurs in the middle of Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900). After Jim’s disgrace on the Patna, Marlow (who takes it upon himself to be the arbiter of Jim’s uncertain future) is approached by a roguish entrepreneur who proposes to establish Jim as “supreme boss” on a guano island “as good as a goldmine.” While this assignment is intended to seem humiliating, it reminds us that guano was indeed a strategic resource, as significant as gold (Almayer’s Folly), ivory (Heart of Darkness), or silver (Nostromo).
As the world’s major source of nitrogen, the guano trade was critical to industrial agriculture in the colonies and to the manufacture of gunpowder and explosives. In 1909, however, Fritz Haber developed a technological breakthrough whose significance to the 20th century is hard to overstate. His technique for fixing nitrogen directly from the atmosphere—the “Haber Process”—yielded an almost unlimited supply of what had been a scarce resource. The mass-production of nitrogen as a synthetic fertilizer promised a utopian solution for eradicating world hunger, but it also created the unprecedented weaponry that fueled both World Wars.
My talk puts traces a vision of utopian/apocalyptic technoscience through Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. Novels like Wells’s The Food of the Gods (1904) anticipate the radical “change of scale in human affairs,” and the ecological disasters, that accompany such Promethean moments.