Research seminar "Reading The Modernist Anthropocene"

Peter Adkins, University of Edinburgh

16 September 2022 at 16:00

Lossi 3, room 406

On Friday, September 16 at 16:00 the Department of English Studies will organize a research seminar on the modernist Anthropocene. Peter Adkins, Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, will introduce his recently published book The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

This talk will outline how in the first few decades of the twentieth century, a range of writers became attuned to widespread changing environmental conditions brought about by human actions, or what is often today referred to as the Anthropocene. Spurred into forging new ways of responding to shifts in local, national and planetary environments, these writers both drew on and shaped discourse around nonhuman life, species relations, fossil fuel usage and mass extinction.

The Modernist Anthropocene, this talk will argue, represents a discrete moment in both environmental history and literary history, a record of how the planet was changing and the literary responses it triggered. Looking particularly at the portrayal of climate change we find in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), I will suggest how modernist fiction was able to respond to these changes and the clues it might offer us in our own contemporary moment.

The seminar is part of Estonian Research Council grant “Imagining Crisis Ordinariness”.

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