How Things Will Go: Genre and Infrastructure in the Environmental Humanities (ASAP/13)
Genre and infrastructure are both structuring forms that shape how things will go. Generic narrative worlds shape emplotment, likely or unlikely events, types of characters, in/appropriate actions, and readerly expectations; genre organizes both narrative elements and the relations between them by creating frames and edges through which to interpret the world. Likewise, infrastructures organize things and the relations between them, whether by enabling or blocking the movement of people and objects. They constrain or facilitate uses and perceptions. This seminar will consider the affordances of genre for infrastructure and of infrastructure for genre, asking how these structuring forms are being taken up in the environmental humanities.