Through readings of the works of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald, David Farrier explores the idea of Anthropocene as marked by haunted time.
John Ryan examines biopoetry experiments that encoded poetry into DNA, asking if biopoetry and the encipherment process are conceptual and methodological experimentations, or if they reflect ecological consciousness and ethical imperative for life.
Andrew Mark describes Bob Wiseman’s allegorical piece, Uranium, arguing that it accesses emotion to alter the consciousness of percipients.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Alexa Weik von Mossner analyzes Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.
For the special section “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Kate Wright points to a photograph of two young men laughing as their hair stands up, only to be struck by lightning moments later, as a reminder of how tragic and dangerous the cognitive illusion of human exceptionalism can be. She sees Environmental Humanities as an attempt to address the systemic pathology of a species disconnected from the conditions of its world.
Anna Svenson considers the epistemological implications of the digitization of the Directors’ Correspondence (DC) collection (1841-1928) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She concludes that care is needed to avoid replicating the invisible losses of extractive approaches to knowledge production, particularly in the context of collection-based biodiversity conservation.
In this commentary piece, the six authors attempt to “reboot” or reinstitute a concept close to the heart of the Moderns, namely the assumption that the traditional concept of nature, as developed through modern European history, would no longer be adequate to a future beset by environmental crises.
This virtual exhibition features, in English translation, short excerpts from German-language literary texts that address human-nature entanglements. The aim is to show how literature can contribute to understanding and problematizing the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. What aspects of human-nature relations are addressed, at what point in literary history, and how are they shaped poetically? For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this chapter of her virtual exhibition “Human-Nature Relations in German Literature,” Sabine Wilke examines forests and deforestation in works by Adalbert Stifter, Marlen Haushofer, and Elfriede Jelinek. For the German-language version of this exhibition, click here.
