The Anthropocene describes an epoch—our epoch—in which human activity has so profoundly affected the biosphere as to have left its trace in the planet’s stratigraphic record. The very word, “Anthropocene”, brings humankind, or ánthrōpos, into conjunction with geological processes, the “-cene” suffix having been modelled on existing geological epochal nomenclature. This new age of the human thus places human-sized time, with human-sized concerns, ambitions, hopes, and stories, alongside the dramatically larger durations of geology. And the dawn of the Anthropocene is also an awareness that humans’ profound effect on the planet is overwhelmingly that of damage and discord of its ecosystems and organisms.
How, then, to frame narratives that disabuse humans of their long-held fantasy of species exceptionalism, but that at the same time deploy and re-centre human response and responsibility as the most obvious solution to the Anthropocene’s ecological emergencies? This class is concerned with the place of that ubiquitous narrative mode—the novel—in the Anthropocene. Specifically, it asks if the novel is adequate to the representational and ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene, and it examines contemporary novels that grapple with this question. We will discuss issues such as: setting and scale (from the human-sized to the planetary, from the day-to-day to the longue durée to the geological epoch); perspective, voice, and reader empathy (if the moral dilemma at the heart of the Anthropocene is how to de-centre and re-centre human agency, how can novels cultivate a diffused, non-anthropocentric point-of-view?); and the boundaries between politics and didactics, literature and public service messaging (after all, is there really any moral obligation for novels to make us feel, think, and act differently in a time of environmental emergency?).
For this course, please be prepared to read some pretty big books. A provisional reading list includes Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, along with shorter works such as Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
