Readings in the Anthropocene

Sabine Wilke is Professor of German at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where she is also associated with European Studies and the Program in Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, and cultural studies. She is the author of German Culture and the Modern Environmental Imagination (2015) and editor of From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form (Bloomsbury, 2012). Japhet Johnstone is project manager and translator at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor of Crimes of Passion: Representations of Sexual Pathology in the Early Twentieth Century (2015).

Introduction: Rethinking Literary History, Critical Reading Practices, and Cultural Studies in the Anthropocene
Sabine Wilke, University of Washington, USA

I. Entanglements
1. A World Without Us: Aesthetic, Literary and Scientific Imaginations of Nature beyond Humankind
Wolfgang Struck, University of Erfurt, Germany
2. Hybrid Environments in the Anthropocene: Recent Fiction
Carolina Schaumann, Emory University, USA, and Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA
3. Looking Behind Walls. Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature and Humanity in Haushofer's Die Wand
Sabine Frost, University of Washington, USA


II. Excess/Sustainability
4. Care and Forethought: The Idea of Sustainability in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy
Klaus Vieweg, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany
5. Save the Forest, Burn Books: On the Science and Poetics of Sustainability in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Markus Wilczek, Tufts University, USA
6. Mocking the Anthropocene: Caricatures of Man-made Landscapes in German Satirical Magazines from the Fin de Siècle
Evi Zemanek, University of Freiburg, Germany
7. The Darkness of the Anthropocene: Wolfgang Hilbig’s Alte Abdeckerei.
Sabine Nöllgen, University of Puget Sound, USA

III. Periodization and Scale
8. Immanuel Kant, the Anthropocene, and the Idea of Environmental Cosmopolitanism
Amos Nascimento, University of Washington Tacoma, USA
9. Adalbert Stifter and the Gentle Anthropocene
Sean Ireton, University of Missouri, USA
10. Engineering the Anthropocene: Technology, Ambition, and Enlightenment in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter
Katie Ritson

IV. Diffusion, the Lithic, and a Planetary Praxis
11. Petrifiction: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism
Jason Groves, San Francisco State University, USA
12. The Anthroposcene of Literature: Diffuse Dwelling in Graham Swift and W.G. Sebald
Bernhard Malkmus, Ohio State University, USA
13. Planetary Praxis in the Anthropocene: An Ethics and Poetics for a New Geological Age
Sabine Wilke, University of Washington, USA

Epilogue: The Anthropocene in German Perspective
Axel Goodbody, University of Bath, UK

Bibliography
Index