How poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time
The Anthropocene describes how humanity has radically intruded into deep time, the vast timescales that shape the Earth system and all life-forms that it supports. The challenge it poses—how to live in our present moment alongside deep pasts and futures—brings into sharp focus the importance of grasping the nature of our intimate relationship with geological time. In Anthropocene Poetics, David Farrier shows how contemporary poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Evelyn Reilly, and Christian Bök, among others, provides us with frameworks for thinking about this uncanny sense of time.
Looking at a diverse array of lyric and avant-garde poetry from three interrelated perspectives—the Anthropocene and the “material turn” in environmental philosophy; the Plantationocene and the role of global capitalism in environmental crisis; and the emergence of multispecies ethics and extinction studies—Farrier rethinks the environmental humanities from a literary critical perspective. Anthropocene Poetics puts a concern with deep time at the center, defining a new poetics for thinking through humanity’s role as geological agents, the devastation caused by resource extraction, and the looming extinction crisis.
Advancing a phenomenological approach to deep time
Our imagination today is dominated by the end of the world, from sci-fi and climate fiction to actual predictions of biodiversity collapse, climate disruption, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. This obsession with the world’s precarity, The Memory of the World contends, relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Not only does this mislead sustainability efforts, it diminishes our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.
Here, Ted Toadvine takes a phenomenological approach to deep time to show how our apocalyptic imagination forgets the sublime and uncanny dimensions of the geological past and far future. Guided by original readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, he suggests that reconciling our embodied lives with the memory of the earth transforms our relationship with materiality, other forms of life, and the unprecedented future.
Integrating insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism, The Memory of the World argues for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the multiple, pleated, and entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations.
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