Authors:Jens Kirk, Lars Bang Larsen, Morten Ziethen Pages: 4 - 10 Abstract: This article falls into two sections. First, the Anthropocene is outlined in terms of a fundamental and unique shock to the imagination. Secondly, the article sketches out a range of responses and attitudes to the Anthropocene shock, including apathy, activism, and intervention. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7631
Authors:Bageshree Trivedi Pages: 11 - 22 Abstract: Theoretical research on Dhruv Bhatt – one of the most important contemporary Gujarati novelists – has remained restricted to simplistic ecocritical reading(s). In this article, I analyse Bhatt’s novel Akoopār (2010) to investigate how layered exploration(s) of the ‘female’ as human, ancestor, myth, or affective attitude, as negotiated by the artist-anthropologist narrator, prises open the violence of centres (the Anglophone/the urban/colonialist) and offers an alternative narrative of the Anthropocene by tracing human intervention in the environment through local-cultural mytho-history. In doing so, the novel recentres the subject from eco-‘logy’ whose definition is often hijacked by the ‘logos’ of ‘discovery’, to ‘ecosystem’ depicted as a complex network of environment, cultural knowledge(s), linguistic practices, myth, memory, and collective action. I also use the theoretical approach of ecofeminism to highlight the use of ‘female’ as an approach of resistance in battling ecological crises in postcolonial regions structured through the complex collusion of colonial and traditional patriarchy, and the framework of decoloniality to foreground the significance of epistemic revisions in re-viewing the human-nonhuman divide. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7632
Authors:Amar Singh, Shipra Tholia Pages: 23 - 36 Abstract: Anthropogenic development has reduced the concept of stability to an imaginary state. Thomas Nail prefers the term “Kinocene” to Anthropocene or Capitalocene to describe modern times since it suggests a reconfiguration of human-nonhuman relations. This is where the interpretation of classic tales through contemporary lenses becomes relevant concerning re-imagining them in the context of marginalized voices. An example of this is the Bollywood film Sherni, which finds its tropes in the Shrew tales, famously used by Shakespeare. This article is divided into three sections, followed by a conclusion. The first section introduces Thomas Nail’s concept of border, allowing the analysis to focus on extensive and intensive movements. The former pertains to the observation of external manifestations of hegemonical exercise perpetuated within India as a legacy of colonialism. Following the discussion of the colonial legacy, examining the intensive movement illustrates how Shakespeare’s Shrew tropes emerge as the film expresses its resistance to patriarchy and creates empathy for the nonhuman actor. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7633
Authors:Emilie Dybdal Pages: 37 - 50 Abstract: Danish Greenland-literature and the hunt for the anthropocene This article examines the role of climate change and the Anthropocene in contemporary Danish literature about Greenland. I argue that even though Danish literature in general has been very concerned with anthropogenic climate change in recent years, this is not the case for Danish literature specifically about Greenland. To illustrate this, I begin with a short literary overview, after which I focus on the novel Korsveje i Nord (2015) by Bjarne Ljungdahl. This book, I define as an example of cli-fi (“climate fiction” or “climate change fiction”) that does engage with Greenland, and I analyze its view on the Anthropocene. Following this main part of the article, I briefly discuss what potentials cli-fi’s such as Korsveje i Nord might hold in the discussion of anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene, and I turn my attention to literature about Greenland from outside Denmark. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7634
Authors:Irina Souch Pages: 51 - 63 Abstract: “Troubling the Water: Hydro-imaginaries in Nordic Television Drama” discusses a selection of Nordic television series to consider how they employ Anthropocenic imagery to challenge the Nordic governments’ long-established attitude as sustainable and environment-friendly. Despite their different genres and aesthetic qualities these series share their concerns about the availability of clean water usually perceived as everlasting given the Nordic countries’ physical geographical features. The close reading of relevant fragments from various series allows to interrogate such uncritical understanding of water as a “passive” commodity to serve modern societies anthropogenic wants, rather than eco-social needs. The article particularly focuses on the last season of the Danish family drama The Legacy which explicitly engages with water as being central to issues of social justice as much as issues of environmental concern. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7635
Authors:Robert A Saunders Pages: 64 - 78 Abstract: This paper examines the latent ecocriticism of the horror-comedy Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) against its original source material in the context of climate catastrophe culture. As a sequel to the Ghostbusters films (1984, 1989), Afterlife shifts the setting: (geo)physically, from metropolitan New York City to a ‘dirt farm’ in Summerville, Oklahoma, and generationally, from the original middle-aged, male ghost-catchers to the teenaged grandchildren of the brightest among them. While the original antagonist – the (fictive) Sumerian god Gozer – returns once more to end the world, the Anthropo(s)cenic landscapes of Afterlife establish the film as a geopolitical intervention in the debate on the already-in-progress environmental apocalypse. In its (partial) rejection of the values of its 1980s-era source material, which is critically assessed herein, I argue that Afterlife speaks to humanity’s emergence as a geological agent defined by geopolitical cultures rooted in human exploitation, hydrocarbon extraction, agro-industrialisation, and nuclearism. Indeed, the decade of Reaganism haunts the film, serving as a ghostly reminder of how we arrived at our current Anthropocene predicament through white heteropatriarchal triumphalism, neoliberal excess, and ecocide. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7636
Authors:Anna S. Reuter Pages: 79 - 90 Abstract: What kind of critical approach do literary texts require that portray environmental misdeeds and display an ethos ostensibly calling into question the practices responsible for those misdeeds' Novels and poetry that address guilt and responsibility in the Anthropocene often aestheticize supposedly natural conditions, evoke nostalgic settings, and imagine a return to better times. Thus, they require literary criticism to focus on human responsibility and culpability toward the environment. However, the notion of responsibility is not only to be found in the text as a topic but might also be a necessary stance toward the text. Then, literary criticism would be a matter of responding and making responsibility productive. That means making intelligible the potential of being (speaking) with one another inherent in the structures of language. Drawing on the concept of interpellation and analyzing Juliana Spahr’s poem ”Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”, this article examines the relevance of the notion of responsibility for literary criticism. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7637
Authors:Jens Kramshøj Flinker Pages: 91 - 102 Abstract: Can fiction provide forms of expression that offer an alternative to the discourse of science regarding the Anthropocene' This question is interesting to examine, as the widely accepted science of the Anthropocene seems to have a limited effect on the various public audiences they attempt to reach. Methodologically: I use econarratology to investigate how literature can affect the reader’s understanding of the Anthropocene reality. More specifically, the article focuses on how Charlotte Weitze’s novel The Abominable (Den afskyelige, 2016) immerses us into a storyworld and thereby engages the reader in ways that are rarely possible outside the world of fiction. The article demonstrates how the world-creating power of The Abominable involves, among other things, a disruption of the reader’s storyworld. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7638
Authors:Mads Nyborg Jespersen, Jens Kirk, Asger Jul Rosendorf Pages: 102 - 113 Abstract: How to best approach the Anthropocene in terms of knowledge is an open question. In this paper we outline and discuss how the Anthropocene is imagined as an ongoing project attempting to develop systems of knowledge. Referring to Paul J. Crutzen, Reinhold Leinfelder, and Jan Zalaciewicz, we show how a tradition is forming around the notion of diverse Anthropocene knowledges as unified but split into two, more particularly, into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and social sciences and humanities (SSH). After a reading of two representative takes on the Anthropocene and knowledge by Carolyn Merchant and Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer respectively, we conclude that, despite attempts at interdisciplinarity and knowledge integration, the current ways of approaching the Anthropocene as a field of knowledge involve an uneasy mix of unification and stratification. We end by suggesting ways of overcoming this situation. PubDate: 2023-01-16 DOI: 10.54337/academicquarter.vi25.7639
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