Part of the Department of English Seminar Series

This talk explores transmedial relationships between aesthetics and geology in the Anthropocene, a newly proposed geological epoch in which humans have become a force of planetary significance. Understanding the Anthropocene and our position in it transforms relationships between subject and object, human and nonhuman, figure and ground. In part, this transformation collides two incongruent scales of time and space: the planetary and the human. I’ll discuss a variety of aesthetic strategies for negotiating and articulating this spatiotemporal incongruence, arguing that, through these strategies, art and literature become important sites for articulating new understandings of this relationship between the planetary and the human.

Speaker: Dr. Brian J. McAllister, AUS Department of English