Non-Monumental Ecologies
updated:
Friday, November 25, 2016 - 6:22am
Christopher Walker / Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
deadline for submissions:
Friday, December 9, 2016
Contemporary environmental theory has adopted vast spatial and temporal paradigms as a method for reckoning with global-scale environmental problems. These paradigms—increasingly bracketed under the concepts of the “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “World-Ecology,” and “Great Acceleration,” among others—offer what has been termed a "god’s eye view" of environmental catastrophe. While granting a macro-scale view of human agency and ecological change, these monumental concepts risk collapsing into what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has in another context described as an “ever-broadening present of simultaneities.” In response to the “big history” turn, this panel will attend to the cracks, fissures, and seams in the monumental.