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

人类世的概念界定了千年以来出现的一种有影响力的话语，将人类活动成为全球范围内占主导地位的地球物理力量的世界作为主题。虽然关于人类世的争论主要是由自然科学和社会科学提出的，但这些方法同时有力地阐述了人类和社会在与地球生态系统的交换中所处的地位，以及在生态扩大的人类历史的视野下所处的地位。这些叙事的起源、结构和文化共鸣尚未得到充分分析。从文学和文化研究的角度看待人类世的叙事，解决了关于人类世的争论在叙事结构和潜在的假设、隐喻和意义形成模式方面缺乏反身性的挑战。因此，拟议的项目首先分析了人类世话语的关键文本中的叙事元素。随后，我们将研究以人类世概念为标志的小说主题如何在当代文学及其叙事形式中沉淀，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更抽象的概念。在此过程中，该项目首先旨在促进生态批评方法的进一步发展；第二，探索非人类中心主义的叙事模式，为已有的文学和知识研究提供新的推动力；第三，发展人类世诗学的轮廓，以解释文学文本如何对更广泛的公共辩论产生影响，从而产生社会相关性。总体而言，该项目将改善文学和文化研究视角对跨学科人类世话语的有效贡献的先决条件。

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.