Termine der Germanistik

Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolloquium Herbst 2022

Rebecca Duncan, Linnæus University, Schweden

The Politics of Ecogothic Form: Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia

This talk will examine the politics of speculative literary engagements with the unfolding climate emergency, considering these in light of recent critical engagements with accounts of our present that identify this as ‘the Anthropocene’. Now hegemonic in cultural ecocriticism, the term names the age in which the human species is taken to have transformed the Earth System, thus demonstrating our imbrication with the rest of nature. This analysis forms the unspoken premise of much ecoGothic production in particular, which characteristically deploys uncanny posthuman figures to suggest a return of homo sapiens' repressed entanglement in the biosphere. In taking this as read, I argue, what can be called ‘Anthropocene Gothic’ texts efface the reality in which climate and cognate crises are distributed along intersecting axes of race, gender, class and global geography, and valorize instead universal human culpability and universal posthuman integration with biophysical nature. The result is an aesthetic that – unconcerned with race and gender in particular – frequently reproduces deleterious racializing and gendering discourses, narratives that are themselves inseparable from those which discursively construct the biosphere as a plunderable resource. In response to a growing critical tendency to view the non-anthropocentric or posthuman possibilities of speculative fiction as interrogative par excellence, the talk will thus advocate for a heightened critical sensitivity in gothic- and speculative-fiction studies to the indissociability of climate breakdown and systems of histories of racialised, gendered and class power.

Online-Veranstaltung:

https://uni-flensburg.webex.com/uni-flensburg/j.php?MTID=m0431193bb7ffcf94089b914e48c4372a

Präsentiert in Kooperation mit dem Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies.