Following on from Theory and the Disappearing Future, in Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, Cohen, Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental humanities' newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The question that has escaped focus, as "tipping points" are acknowledged as passed, is how language, mnemo-technologies, and the epistemology of tropes appear to guide the accelerating ecocide, and how that implies a mutation within reading itself-from the era of extinction events.

Following on from Theory and the Disappearing Future, Cohen, Colebrook and Miller turn their attention to the eco-critical and environmental humanities' newest and most fashionable of concepts, the Anthropocene. The question that has escaped focus, as "tipping points" are acknowledged as passed, is how language, mnemo-technologies, and the epistemology of tropes appear to guide the accelerating ecocide, and how that implies a mutation within reading itself-from the era of extinction events. Only in this moment of seeming finality, the authors argue, does there arise an opportunity to be done with mourning and begin reading. Drawing freely on Paul de Man's theory of reading, anthropomorphism and the sublime, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols argues for a mode of critical activism liberated from all-too-human joys and anxieties regarding the future. It was quite a few decades ago (1983) that Jurgen Habermas declared that 'master thinkers had fallen on hard times.' His pronouncement of hard times was premature. For master thinkers it is the best of times. Not only is the world, supposedly, falling into a complete absence of care, thought and frugality, a few hyper-masters have emerged to tell us that these hard times should be the best of times. It is precisely because we face the end that we should embrace our power to geo-engineer, stage the revolution, return to profound thinking, reinvent the subject, and recognize ourselves fully as one global humanity. Enter anthropos. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

It showcases how posthumanism has transformed the humanities and what new work is now possible in light of this unsettling.

Debugging the Anthropocene’s insistence on apocalyptic tropes Where the Anthropocene has become linked to an apocalyptic narrative, and where this narrative carries a widespread escapist belief that salvation will come from a supernatural elsewhere, Joanna Zylinska has a different take. The End of Man rethinks the prophecy of the end of humans, interrogating the rise in populism around the world and offering an ethical vision of a “feminist counterapocalypse,” which challenges many of the masculinist and technicist solutions to our planetary crises. The book is accompanied by a short photo-film, Exit Man, which ultimately asks: If unbridled progress is no longer an option, what kinds of coexistences and collaborations do we create in its aftermath? Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Rachel Loewen Walker's original study of Deleuze's theory of temporality advances a concept of the living present as a critical juncture through which novel meanings and activisms take flight in relation to new feminist materialisms, queer theory, Indigenous studies, and studies of climate. Drawing on literature, philosophy, popular culture, and community research, Loewen Walker unsettles the fierce linearity of our stories, particularly as they uphold fixed systems of gender, sexuality, and identity. Treading new ground for Deleuzian studies, this book focuses on the non-linearity of the living present to show that everything is within rather than outside of time. Through this critical re-evaluation, which takes in climate change, queer and trans politics, and Indigenous sovereignty, Queer and Deleuzian Temporalities “thickens” the present moment. By opening up multiple pasts and multiple futures we are invited to act with a deepened level of accountability to all possible timelines.

Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, Close Reading the Anthropocene explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Both close reading and scientific ecology prioritize slowing down and looking around to apprehend similarities and differences, to recognize and value interconnections. Here "close" suggests careful attention to both the reading subject and read "object." Moving between places, rocks, plants, animals, atmosphere, and eclipses, this interdisciplinary edited collection grounds the complex relations between text and world in the environmental humanities. The volume’s wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies.

Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology.

Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects - beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy. Along the way she encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois.

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.