The Anthropocene: A Literary Stimulus for a Global 21st Century

This paper aims to briefly discuss the concept of the Anthropocene within the geological sciences, and to consider, more broadly, some of the theoretical unfolding of the term within the humanities. Towards its conclusion, the paper presents the demands the Anthropocene makes, as a geological Epoch (in which the human becomes a geophysical force, capable of changing the Earth’s biophysical systems), of literary studies as a possible field for theoretical articulations that may add to the debates on this historical moment in which climate change, forced dislocations, the mass extinction of several species, and other urgent matters come to the fore.

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2021

, aims to deepen understandings of the mutual shaping of the Anthropocene and environmental humanities. The latter, the author claims, has devoted less attention than economics, politics and historical studies to the apprehended environmental issues and climate change. The intended readership for this work needs to be stated straight up. Although written for 'an educated public' of reading clubs, 'undergraduate courses and graduate seminars' (p. xi), The Anthropocene & the Humanities read, to me, like a high-school-and early undergraduate-level take on human-made climate change, industrial capitalist economies and their depictions in art and literature. The work's geographical bias, by no means an inherent fault, should have been flagged up; the perspective it is written from, and the putative readership it is intended for, are North American. This is because the aforementioned undergraduates are the sorts of students who, in the US, study in liberal-arts colleges or take comparative-literature courses whilst intending to pursue science majors. Such constituencies have shaped the choices Merchant has made. The intention of this book is to demonstrate how 'the concept of the Anthropocene goes beyond earlier concepts and periodizations such as preindustrial, colonial, industrial, modern and postmodern by presenting a clear and forceful characterization of the future crisis humankind faces' (p. xi) and to illustrate its impact upon literature, art and philosophy, and to a lesser extent the law. The six short chapters are scaled for the designated readership. The narrative is paced to allow for non-expert readers to absorb this important argument. The temporal scope of the book ranges from circa the sixth century BC to the present. Its spatial scope is predominantly northern-hemisphere and anglophone. Chapter 1 surveys the definition of the Anthropocene formulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and the key figures and researchers who have advanced various conceptual terms inspired by the former. The book includes black-and-white images of the theorists whose ideas are discussed, from

Gragoatá, 2022

The article aims to analyze Antonio Candido's Literatura e subdesenvolvimento (1970) out of the reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). In his book, Chakrabarty seeks to understand the motivations of mid-20th century anticolonial leaders in their fight for local development. His analysis, according to our reading, consists of a way of bringing the Anthropocene and its problematics close to postcolonial criticism and indicating the limits of Third World desires for modernization in times of climate change. Literatura e subdesenvolvimento, in this sense, reveals the ambitions of one of the most important Brazilian cultural critics. By claiming literary, political, and economic dependence, Antonio Candido expresses the modernizing aspirations of an entire generation. Our aim is to bring out the modernizing project that the text insinuates with the aid of postcolonial theory and to question its methods in the face of the Anthropocene.

the minnesota review, 2014

This introduction to the focus section on “Writing the Anthropocene” [in "the minnesota review" vol. 2014, number 82] examines the challenges that the entry of our species into a new geological epoch poses for the humanities in general and for literary and media theory in particular. It proposes the hypothesis that the Anthropocene can best be understood as a form of writing, a process by which humankind inscribes permanent messages into the geological, climatological, and biochemical records of our planet and is forced, in turn, to study those records for messages pertaining to its future. It discusses the relationship of the Anthropocene to the wider discourse of posthumanism and also touches upon the importance of speculative realism as well as genres like the science-fiction novel to help us conceptualize our new condition. A brief summary of each of the ten essays in the focus section follows.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Book review of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene.

British and American Studies, 2022

In official geologic terms, our age is known as the Holocene, but, unofficially, the term Anthropocene is more and more frequently used to refer to the recent centuries and decades, in which the human impact on the planet, its climate and ecosystems, has had visible and irreversible effects. Ironically, the rise of rationalism, the triumph of science and the advances in technology have been responsible both for progress, improving living standards and enlightenment, and also for the confirmation of the destructive power of the human species. Reacting against the effects of industrialization and urbanization, the Romantic poets and artists were, in many ways, the first environmentalists. Their nostalgia for a preindustrial world, for the natural rhythms of life and work, their belief in the protection and love God offers all creatures, animals, and plants, all follow intuitively the principles much more recently outlined by eco-ethics. The book edited by Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione, academics at the University of Turin, Italy, in the Environmental Studies series of Lexington Books goes beyond the abstract purposes of literary criticism and theory, in a successful attempt to draw the readers' attention to important and urgent contemporary concerns. As philosopher and cultural critic Santiago Zabala argues in the Foreword, the relevance of this volume lies in its powerful evocation of an emergency which most of us do not confront directly. But the absence of urgency doesn't make silent emergencies any less serious. If in 2020 the pandemic grabbed us all, more or less symbolically, by the lapels, after it had been an ignored emergency for years, the same can be said about the environmental crisis humanity is facing at the beginning of the third millennium. At the same time, the value of this book consists in its capacity to demonstrate that, while science follows its own path, often inexorably, literatures and arts are more capable of raising public awareness, because of the emotional hold they have on the public. If scientists can barely make their warning reach our ears, written stories, poems, photographs and music will hopefully reach our hearts. In Santiago Zabala's words, "while science seeks to rescue us from emergencies by improving and preserving knowledge, the arts rescue us into emergencies, calling for our intervention, as this book does."

Metactritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2017

Among eco studies, the Anthropocene theory is by far the most unusual in the field of humanities. First and foremost, it differs from the Eco-Marxist criticism in that that its grounding is not in critical theory, but in the scientifically traceable changes in the environment, which are then re-politicised. Secondly, its claims pose a certain pessimism, in contrast with the activist optimism that we can still change something about our future as a species. In the Anthropocene, humans have changed the face of the Earth in so much that it is irreversible, the industrial man versus nature paradigm is now obsolete and replaced by man as a force of nature. Then why is this part of the “studies” series, what critical insight can humanities impose on the gloom data?

History and Theory, 2023

History and Theory 62:2 (2023), 320-333. Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.

Ecozon@, 2016

By now, anyone in their right mind knows what it takes to avert environmental apocalypse: all we need to do is pollute less, emit less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, consume less, produce less, procreate less, and so on. However, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann pointedly noted in his book Ecological Communication (first published in 1985, translated into English in 1989), "whoever puts the problem this way does not reckon with society, or else interprets society like an actor who needs instruction and exhortation" (Luhmann, 133). In other words, to avoid getting bogged down in misdirected criticism, utopian or fatalistic scenarios about the end of the world, our solutions to the environmental problems of the twenty-first century should somehow be commensurate with the dynamics of an increasingly complex and interconnected world society. While this realization led Luhmann to construct a highly abstract and, according to some critics, rather unwieldly theory of modernity apparently immune to falsification, recent scholarship in the environmental humanities has adduced a lot of fascinating empirical data to show why humans continue to destroy their own life world, apparently much against everyone's advice. The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, two historians currently working at the Centre Alexandre-Koiré at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, is a highly incisive contribution to this rapidly growing body of environmental research. The original title of the book, somewhat hastily translated from the French by David Fernbach, reads L'Evénement Anthropocène (the Anthropocene event), which hints at the authors' intellectual indebtedness to the work of, among others, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour (and via Latour, Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy of the event has been very influential in French philosophy). This conceptual framework, combined with a commitment to thorough quantitative research, gives The Shock of the Anthropocene an edge in relation to some of the conceptually and empirically less grounded debates in the Anglo-American environmental humanities. But what makes it a most stimulating book, in the present reader's view, is the authors' willingness to point out the tenacity of what they call the "grand narrative" of the Anthropocene even in the work of their intellectual mentors and allies, including Latour and such leading scholars as Dipesh Chakrabarty. What is that grand narrative of the Anthropocene? This can be stated rather simply: Overnight, as it were, we have entered a new geological era as a consequence of our tinkering with the environment. Only now, thanks to advances in climate science, we are coming to realize the implications of this potentially disastrous development,