Literature and the Anthropocene

Abstract

Since 2000, when geologist Paul Crutzen first mooted the idea that the planet was entering a new epoch dominated by humans, his term for this new epoch—the Anthropocene—has grown in popularity. At the same time, as awareness of the scale and dangers associated withof ongoing environmentalecological crises has spread, a new geographical environmental imagination has emerged to grapple with the challenges of life on a rapidly changing planet. This thesis looks at contemporary literary and critical responses to four environmental ecological crises—the disappearance of open landscapes, mass extinction, climate change, and the spread of waste—in order to examine how the cultural sphere has begun to engage with the political, environmentalecological, and social issues that intertwine in the Anthropocene. I argue that while each of the texts examined here offers a distinct response to these crises, they share a broad vision of an Anthropocene future marked by the emergence of agency in non-human objects; the end of the separation between nature and culture; and a skeptical response to promises of technological deliverance. As a whole, these anxieties point toward both a de-centering of human subjectivity and an end to human exceptionalism at the very moment that human activity begins to restructure the workings of the Earth System. In addition to reflecting anxieties about possible Anthropocene futures, I argue that a close reading of these texts offers implicit critiques of the standard Anthropocene narrative, according to which a unitary humanity has unknowingly stumbled into more power than it can handle. This narrative threatens to securitize the issues of planetary change, with the effect that possible solutions to the crises can be reached only by reliance on “experts” and through solutions that operate within (but do not question) current political and economic systems; instead, I show that the texts examined in this thesis respond to current environmental crises by pluralizing the Anthropocene and opening up new modes of engagement that are made possible when the discourse is loosed from its origin in the scientific community. To do this, the texts examined here—which range from travel writing and other forms of literary non-fiction to popular criticism as well as novels and films—draw attention to the spaces, communities, and nonhumans that are left out of the standard narrative, and give voice to the planetary-scale threats that emerge when human activity intersects with and interrupts planetary systems. This thesis contends that the first generation of Anthropocene cultural works offers both warnings of coming disruptions as well as diagnoses of the current inequalities and social practices that invite the worst of possible futures. Ultimately, the texts disclose new modes of de-centering, connection, and collaboration with nonhuman forces in order to gesture toward a brighter future.

[451 words]