Temporality of the Anthropocene: Time Scales and the Environmental Humanities
October 22, 2015
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Professor Heather Sullivan, German Studies, Trinity University
Thursday, October 22nd at 4:00pm in 1501 UH • Reception to follow
In this talk, Professor Heather Sullivan proposes a trope for the humanities as a means of grappling with the paradoxes and problems of the Anthropocene: the “dark pastoral,” whose darkness is especially poignant with the immersion into the fossil-fueled acceleration of modern industrial capitalism. Typical to the literary pastoral’s duplicity that ignores power structures by documenting local fields, thereby upholding colonial and imperial practices, the dark pastoral evokes a polarity of, on the one side, the dreams of retreat into green landscapes–themselves agriculturally artificial, of course–and, on the other, the fears of dark oil spills, toxic landscapes, and environmental injustice. The dark pastoral is both urban nature and toxic forests, human agency and hopelessness, species extinction and a “vibrant” “new nature” whose changes are ever accelerating.
Sponsored by the Temporalities and Political Ecologies Working Groups, the Institute for the Humanities, and the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics.
Date posted
Jun 10, 2020
Date updated
Jun 10, 2020