Anthropocene Investigations. ENGL 80600 Spring 2025

GC 3207

Alexander Schlutz

[email protected]

GC office: 4406.10

office hours: M 1-2pm and by appointment

Required Texts

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-7456-8434-5

Yussof, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2018.

ISBN: 978-1-5179-0753-2, available for free online: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-billion-black-anthropocenes-or-none

Bilodeau, Chantal. Sila. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-88922-956-3

Bilodeau, Chantal. Forward. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-77201-183-8

Reilly, Evelyn. Styrofoam. New York: Roof Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-93182-432-3

Reilly, Evelyn. Apocalypso. New York Roof Books, 2012. ISBN 978-1-931824-45-3

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-57131-356-0

For the GC online bookstore page see here: https://gc.textbookx.com/institutional/index.php?action=browse#books/4770418/

(Latour’s Facing Gaia and Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are also available electronically via the GC course e-reserve page; Bilodeau’s plays and Reilly’s books of poetry are currently on order and should be available there, soon.)

All articles and book chapters on the syllabus are available through the John Jay e-reserve page (https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/er.php?course_id=115425). The password to access our course readings is “anthropocene.” I may add to the material on e-reserve throughout the semester.

You will find the books on electronic reserve via the GC library (see Course Bibliography/Library E-Book Reserve below) by accessing this site: https://libguides.gc.cuny.edu/er.php?b=c Scroll down to find our course and enter the password: ENGLSchlutz.

Course Description

The term “Anthropocene,” first introduced by the chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stroemer twenty-five years ago, has by now become the most widely used designation for the current period of global, human-induced environmental catastrophe in both scholarly and public discourse. The appropriateness of the term (though of course not the global crisis it seeks to highlight) has, however, been subject to vigorous critique in the social sciences and the humanities, mainly due to its problematic naturalization of the human and its erasure of crucial questions of human difference and responsibility. From the perspective of the humanities in particular, a return to a species narrative, with an undifferentiated anthropos writ large as the protagonist, can seem to erase in one fell swoop decades of scholarly work in critique of essentialist conceptions of “the human.” A range of alternatives, from Capitalocene to Chtulucene, have been proposed in an effort to alter the narrative parameters in order to call anthropocene grand narratives into question.

At the same time, a growing number of scholars in the humanities take seriously the challenge of the “Anthropocene” to rethink what viable narratives about and representations of the relationships of human beings to their environments might look like at a moment of global crisis where human and natural history can no longer be thought of as disentangled. Such attempts include a newly framed engagement with literature and art more broadly as modes of representation that might allow us to bring the contemporary human predicament into view in different ways than scientific data and public policy debates.

To address these overlapping discussions, this seminar will offer a two-fold investigation. On the one hand, we will attempt to take stock of the disciplinary discussion surrounding the “Anthropocene” and examine a range of critical perspectives and proposed alternatives in naming and timeline. At the same time, we will also turn our attention to emergent transdisciplinary approaches in the environmental humanities, as well as to the creative literary practice in order to investigate what a poetics for the “Anthropocene” might look like.

Course Learning Goals

By the end of the course, students will demonstrate

• familiarity with a variety of theoretical positions in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities in the contemporary Anthropocene debate

• familiarity with the transdisciplinary approach of the Environmental Humanities

• understanding of positions in Anhropocene poetics and the role of literature and the arts in the debate

• development and refinement of essential academic skills, such as close reading of literary and theoretical texts, the presentation of a conference talk, and the writing of a research paper

Course Requirements and Graded Work

1. 3 short, 2-page informal position papers in response to course readings (due Saturday evening). 15%

2. One 7-8-page conference paper and 300-word abstract (~20 min. in-class presentation). 25%

3. One 15-page research paper. 60%

(students taking the course for two graded credits need only fulfill requirement 1, those taking the course for three credits only requirements 1 and 2; for those taking the course for four credits: the conference paper can and indeed should treat the same topic as the subsequent research paper)

Course Calendar

Week 1

Jan 27: Course Introduction; Crutzen & Stroemer: “The Anthropocene,” Crutzen: “Geology of Mankind”; Bird Rose et al. “Thinking Through Environment, Unsettling the Humanities”;

Lane (from: Anthropocene Blues): “The Truth About the Present,” “The Geologist Scrutinizes Dinosaurs in the Anthropocene,” “The Geologist Considers the Post-Pastoral”

Week 2

Feb 3: Steffen et al.: “The Anthropocene: Historical and Conceptual Perspectives,” Lewis & Maslin: “Defining the Anthropocene,” Zalasiewicz et al.: “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?,” AWG: “Executive Summary. Anthropocene Epoch & Crawfordian Age”; Schneiderman: “The Anthropocene Controversy,” Nichols & Gogineni: “The Anthropocene’s Dating Problem,” Bonneuil & Fressoz: The Shock of the Anthropocene ch. 2 “Thinking with Gaia”

Lane (from: Anthropocene Blues): “After the Great Acceleration,” “Erosion” (23), “The Geologist Speaks of Phosphate”

Week 3

Feb 10: Chakrabarty: “The Climate of History,” Malm & Hornborg: “The Geology of Mankind?,” Chernilo: “Question of the Human in the Anthropocene,” Bonneuil: “The Geological Turn,” Crist: “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” Castree: “The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities,” Lövbrand et al.: “Who speaks for the Future of the Earth?,” Whyte: “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene.”

Lane (from: Anthropocene Blues): “The Geologist Anticipates the End of Time,” “Erosion” (32-33)

Week 4

Feb 18 (Tuesday! Classes on Monday schedule!): Latour: Facing Gaia, Introduction, Lectures 1-4

Week 5

Feb 24: Latour: Facing Gaia, Lectures 5-8

Week 6

Mar 3: Haraway: Staying with the Trouble, ch. 2-4, “Staying with the Trouble for Multispecies Environmental Justice (response to reviews),” Gilbert et al.: “Symbiotic View of Life,” McFall-Ngai: “Noticing Microbial Worlds,” Plumwood: “Nature in the Active Voice,” Alaimo: “This is Your Shell on Acid”

Week 7

Mar 10: Tsing: “Mushrooms as Companion Species,” “Threat to Holocene Resurgence,” Latour: “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Haraway et al. “Anthropologists are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Heise: Imagining Extinction ch. 6 “Multispecies Fictions for the Anthropocene,” Bird Rose: “Shimmer,” Le Guin: “Deep in Admiration”

Week 8

Mar 17: Colebrook: “Not Symbiosis, Not Now,” “What is the Anthropo-Political?” “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene,” Szerszynski: “The End of the End of Nature,” Clark: “Some Climate Change Ironies,” Chakrabarty: “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”

Week 9

Mar 24: Yussof: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Week 10

Mar 31: no class

Week 11

Apr 07: Bilodeau: Sila & Forward; Banerjee: “Long Environmentalism,” “Why Polar Bears? (Anthropocene Art),” Heise: “The Hug of the Polar Bear,” Hird & Zahara: “The Arctic Wastes

Week 12

Apr 14: no class

Week 13

Apr 21: Reilly: Styrofoam & Apocalypso; Hume: “Imagining Ecopoetics”; Milne: “Water & Plastic”; Keller: “Under These Apo-Calypso Rays,” conference paper abstract due

Week 14

Apr 28: Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, ix-201 (Preface-Honorable Harvest)

Week 15

May 05: Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, 203-384 (Braiding Sweetgrass-Epilogue)

Week 16

May 12: In-class conference I

Finals Week

May 19: In-class conference II

research paper due June 01

Select Course Bibliography/Library E-Book Reserve

(books marked “available as e-resource” are on the library e-book reserve page, for other free e-resources online I’ve given the URL)

Banerjee, Subhankar. Arctic Voices. Resistance at the Tipping Point. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. GN473 .A76 2012 (e-resource)

Behar, Katherine and Emmy Mikelson (eds.) And Another Thing. Nonanthropocentrism and Art. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum, 2016. (free e-resource: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/and-another-thing/)

Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Paptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso, 2017. GF 75 .B67 2017 (e-resource)

Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. (on order)

Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature. Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage, 2011. P 85 .B77 J47 2001 (e-resource)

Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism at the Edge. The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. PN 98 .E36 C534 2015 (e-resource)

Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2016. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/twilight-of-the-anthropocene-idols/)

Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Posthuman. Essays on Extinction, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/death-of-the-posthuman/)

Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin (eds.) Art in the Anthropocene. Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/)

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. (e-resource)

Demos, T.J. Against the Anthropocene. Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017. GE195 .D46 2017 (e-resource)

Edwards, Justin, Rune Graulund and Johann Höglund, eds. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2022. (e-resource)

Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics. Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2019. PN1065 .F37 2019 (e-resource)

Grusin, Richard, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2017. GN33.8 .A67 2017 (e-resource)

Hamilton, Clive, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (eds.). The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. London, Routledge, 2015. GE149 .A67 2015 (e-resource)

— . Earthmasters: The Dawn of Climate Engineering. New Haven, Yale UP, 2013. QC928 .H36 2013 (e-resource)

— . Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. GF41 .H363 2017 (e-resource)

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chtulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. QL85 .H369 2016 (e-resource)

— . Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989. QL 737 .P9 H245 1989 (e-resource)

Harding, Sandra. Science from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Q175.5 .H395 2008 (e-resource)

— . The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. HQ 1397 .H28 1986. (also available as e-resource)

Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction. The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. QH78 .H45 2016 (e-resource)

Heise, Ursula K., Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann (eds.). The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge, 2017. GE105 .R68 2017

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene. On Science, Belief, and the Humanities. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2018. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/practicing-relativism-in-the-anthropocene/)

Howe, Cymene and Anand Pandian, eds. Anthropocene Unseen. A Lexicon. Brooklyn: Punctum, 2020. (e-resource)

Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics. North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. University of Virgina Press, 2017. (e-resource)

Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia. Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006. QH343.4 .L694 2007 (e-resource)

Latour, Bruno Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. QH 331 .L3313 2017 (e-resource)

— . An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: an Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. CB 358 .L27813 2013 (e-resource)

— . We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Q 175.5 L3513 1993 (e-resource)

Lovelock, James. The Revenge of Gaia. Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006. QH343.4 .L694 2007 (e-resource)

Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1999. QH548 .M35 1998 (e-resource)

Menely, Tobias and Jesse Oak Taylor (ed.) Anthropocene Reading. Literary History in Geologic Times. University Park: Penn State UP, 2017. PN 441 .A73 2017 (e-resource)

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Q 130 .M47 1980. (e-resource)

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. HQ 1233 .P58 1993 (e-resource)

— . Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. GF 21 .P58 2002 (e-resource)

Ronda, Maragret. Remainders. American Poetry at Nature’s End. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017. (e-resource)

Reiss, Julie (ed.). Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene. Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2019. N8217 .E28 A784 2019 (e-resource)

Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/in-catastrophic-times/

Squarzoni, Philippe. Climate Changed. A Personal Journey Through the Science. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2014. QC 903 .S6813 2014 (e-resource)

Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions. The Novel in the Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2015. PN 3448 .E36 T84 2015 (e-resource)

Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. GF 21 .T76 2015 (e-resource)

Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. (available as e-resource)

Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014. (free e-resource: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/minimal-ethics-for-the-anthropocene/

Special Journal Issues

Clark, Timothy (ed.): “Deconstruction in the Anthropocene.” Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012).

(Essays by Szerszynski, Colebrook, Squire, Morton, Cohen, Clark, Solnick, Trexler)

Earth Island Journal 28.1 (Spring 2013)

Select Literature and Ecology / Ecocriticism Resources

(Titles marked e-resource here are not on our course e-reserve, but are available online via the library catalog.)

Readers and Handbooks:

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. PN98 .E36 C53 2011

Garrard, Greg (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford: OUP, 2014. (e-resource)

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader. Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. PN81 .E24 1996

Branch, Michael P. and Scott Slovic, eds. The ISLE Reader. Ecocriticism, 1993-2003. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. PN98 .E36 I85 2003

Coupe, Lawrence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. (e-resource)

Edited Collections:

Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. PR143 .B49 2001

Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster, eds.. The Bioregional Imagination. Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. (e-resource)

Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening of Literary Scholarship. Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. (e-resource)

Gersdorf, Catrin and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature in Literary and Cultural studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. (e-resource)

Sessions, George, ed. Deep Ecology for the 21^st Century. Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.

Monographs:

Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge, 2010. (on order @ GC)

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World. Literature, Culture, and the Environment in the U.S. And Beyond. Harvard: Belknap, 2001. (e-resource)

— . The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. (e-resource)

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. (e-resource)

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: OUP, 2008.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012.

— . Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. (e-resource)

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