Doing Anthropocene History #1: Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene – theoretical reflections and examples in contemporary narratives

Seminar

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This seminar will look upon natural archives (e.g. fossils, glacier, tree rings) as unintentional earth-historical traces and their role in the natural-cultural memory and their practices of reading, collecting, preserving, interpreting and affecting cultural narratives of climate change. The first part gives insight into the theory of a natural-cultural memory with respect to the dimensions of materiality, multiscalarity of different time scales, multispecies entanglements, and mediality. The longer second part applies this findings on examples of contemporary narrations, probably Robert Macfarlane's appraised book "Underland. A Deep Time Journey" (2019) that represent glaciers as Earth memory, and Susan Schuppli's ethnographic and meditative film "Ice Cores" (2020).

Speaker

Gabriele Dürbeck  has been Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Vechta since 2011. Her research interests include ecocriticism and environmental humanities, disaster literature, ethics and aesthetics in literary representations of ecological transformations, and the work of Elfriede Jelinek in the context of postdramatic theatre and literary anthropology. Professor Dürbeck is the project leader of “Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature. Structures, Themes, Poetics” (German Research Foundation DFG). She is the spokesperson for the Cultural Studies programme at the University of Vechta and a member of the VISTRA Institute (Vechta Institute of Sustainability Transformation in Rural Areas), which was founded in 2021.

Seminar series contact: Susanna Lidström  and Oscar Hartman Davies