Narrating the Anthropocene

This project explores ways that the Anthropocene, the current epoch in which humans have become a geological force, offers spatiotemporal and rhetorical problems for narrative. The narrative of human-induced climate change and its planetary effects involves reconciling two incongruent timescales, demanding a new sensibility in which human spatio-temporality engages fully with an expansive, planetary scope. One strategy for this reconciliation is aesthetic. I argue that we can turn to rhetorical engagements between lyric and narrative modes for strategies to re-situate these disjunctive spatio-temporalities. This hermeneutic process builds on Jesse Matz’s “time-work,” which see narratives as phenomenological sites for temporal transformation, what he calls “the forms of imagination necessary to rethink the singularities of time today and to subject its totalities to the diversity of narrative’s provisional designs” (“The Art of Time” 282). This project develops Matz’s call by considering transformative possibilities in both time and space. As sites for thinking about interactions between human and lithic timescales, lyric complicates ontological boundaries between natural and human spaces and employs setting as site for temporal interaction. Lyric investigations into relationships between human and lithic time provide hermeneutics for articulating the narrative of climate change. In other words, lyric space-time establishes frames in which narratives of climate change become more seeable and sayable.

Connected works:
“Landscape Rhetoricity: Narrative, Ecology, and Topographic Form.” Narrative 32.3 (October 2024): forthcoming.

“The Rhetoric of Emergence in Narrative.” Diegesis, Special Issue on Narrative Theory in the Anthropocene 9.2 (December 2020): 80–95.

“Lithic Space-Time in Lyric: Narrating the Poetic Anthropocene.” Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism, edited by Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Marcussen, and David Rodriguez. Routledge, 2021.