Narratives of the Anthropocene in Literature and Science: Themes, Structures and Poetics

人类世的概念界定了自千年以来出现的一种有影响力的论述，该论述以人类活动已成为全球范围内占主导地位的地球物理力量的世界为主题。虽然对人类世辩论的贡献主要是由自然科学和社会科学产生的，但这些方法同时阐述了关于人和社会在与行星生态系统交换和在生态扩大的人类历史的地平线下的地位的强有力的叙述。这些叙事的起源、结构和文化共鸣还没有得到充分的分析。关于人类世叙事的文学和文化研究视角解决了这样一个挑战，即人类世辩论在其叙事结构和潜在的假设、隐喻和意义创造模式方面缺乏反身性。因此，拟议的项目初步分析了人类世话语的关键文本中的叙述要素。随后，我们将考察由人类世概念标记的小说主题如何在当代文学中沉淀及其叙事形式，以及这些文学文本和形式如何帮助更广泛的受众理解、处理和批判性地参与到更抽象的概念中。通过这样做，该项目的目的是：第一，促进生态批评方法的进一步发展；第二，探索非以人类为中心的叙述方式，为已有的文学和知识研究提供新的动力；第三，勾勒出人类世诗学的轮廓，以期解释文学文本如何在更广泛的公共辩论中产生影响，从而产生社会意义。总体而言，该项目将改善有效利用文学和文化研究观点对人类世跨学科论述作出贡献的先决条件。

The concept of the Anthropocene demarcates an influential discourse that has emerged since the millennium, thematising a world in which human activities have become the dominant geophysical force on global scale. While contributions to the Anthropocene debate have been dominantly generated by the natural and social sciences, the approaches simultaneously articulate powerful narratives about the position of men and society in exchange with the planetary ecosystem and under the horizon of an ecologically enlarged history of mankind. Origin, structure and cultural resonance of these narratives have not yet been sufficiently analysed. A literary and culture studies perspective on the narratives of the Anthropocene addresses the challenge that the Anthropocene debate lacks reflexivity with regard to its narrative structures and the underlying assumptions, metaphors and patterns of meaning-making. The proposed project therefore initially analyses narrative elements in key texts of the Anthropocene discourse. Subsequently we will examine how the novel themes that are marked up by the Anthropocene concept precipitate in contemporary literature and their narrative forms and how these literary texts and forms help a broader audience to understand, process and critically engage with the more abstract concept. In doing so, the project aims firstly to contribute to further development of the ecocriticism approach; secondly to explore non-anthropocentric modes of narrating and to provide new impulses to the established research on literature and knowledge; and thirdly to develop the outlines of a poetics of the Anthropocene with a view to explaining how literary texts have repercussions on broader public debates and thereby generate societal relevance. Overall the project will improve the preconditions for an effective contribution of perspectives from the literary and culture studies to the interdisciplinary Anthropocene discourse.