After it Almost Unmade: Action in the Wake of Nature
J.M.W. Turner, Wreckers -- Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore (1833-1834)
Tentatively titled After it Almost Unmade: Action in the Wake of Nature, a second monograph project puts literary reading methods in dialogue with Victorian and contemporary thinking about ecological networks. Its aim is to show how the nineteenth century used literary forms to imagine massive systems and the failure of those systems, and how Victorian thinkers nevertheless imagined, in the midst of entropic networks of entangled causation, the possibility for action. In contrast to existing studies of environmental content and ecological themes in this industrial era, this project locates in nineteenth-century literary writing an incipient conceptual language for understanding relations between individual and system, action and environment.
For twenty-first century thinkers like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, our present environmental calamity presents itself most pressingly as a problem of agency. One the one hand, climate change aggrandizes human capacity by placing human action at the center of geological processes; on the other, it radically attenuates this capacity, since no single act now seems capable of altering the course of our system-wide, networked catastrophe. My project unearths a prehistory to this paradoxical situation. The book’s chapters span the high period of nineteenth-century industrialization; they treat the interlinked character-systems of multiplot novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens; theological lyrics about shipwreck, fate, and the end of time by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Anglican Christina Rossetti; novelistic meditations on ruined pastoral environments by Thomas Hardy; watercolor sketches about extraction and dissolution by JMW Turner; and tiny, fragmentary poem-objects composed on torn paper by Emily Brontë. In all this, the book aims to track literary efforts to comprehend individual agency in a world no longer responsive to the post-Enlightenment or bourgeois assumption that individual will can result in effective action. By using literary methods to read nineteenth-century engagements with “fate,” “destiny,” “environment,” “milieu,” “system,” and “climate,” in other words --all shorthand for supraindividual and networked causal systems-- this project speaks to an interdisciplinary audience, spotlighting the power of human creativity at moments when the capacity to act seems lost.
Its central conviction is that the coal-blackened nineteenth century --with its rapacious fossil fuel consumption, ecocidal tendencies, and spectacular carbon debt-- might be seen not just as a key phase in the history of anthropogenic climate change, but as a workshop in which the intellectual tools for diagnosing and contesting this problem were tested.
My recent and upcoming courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene (linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change") have helped me workshop some of these ideas. The working title comes from Hopkins:
For twenty-first century thinkers like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, our present environmental calamity presents itself most pressingly as a problem of agency. One the one hand, climate change aggrandizes human capacity by placing human action at the center of geological processes; on the other, it radically attenuates this capacity, since no single act now seems capable of altering the course of our system-wide, networked catastrophe. My project unearths a prehistory to this paradoxical situation. The book’s chapters span the high period of nineteenth-century industrialization; they treat the interlinked character-systems of multiplot novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens; theological lyrics about shipwreck, fate, and the end of time by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Anglican Christina Rossetti; novelistic meditations on ruined pastoral environments by Thomas Hardy; watercolor sketches about extraction and dissolution by JMW Turner; and tiny, fragmentary poem-objects composed on torn paper by Emily Brontë. In all this, the book aims to track literary efforts to comprehend individual agency in a world no longer responsive to the post-Enlightenment or bourgeois assumption that individual will can result in effective action. By using literary methods to read nineteenth-century engagements with “fate,” “destiny,” “environment,” “milieu,” “system,” and “climate,” in other words --all shorthand for supraindividual and networked causal systems-- this project speaks to an interdisciplinary audience, spotlighting the power of human creativity at moments when the capacity to act seems lost.
Its central conviction is that the coal-blackened nineteenth century --with its rapacious fossil fuel consumption, ecocidal tendencies, and spectacular carbon debt-- might be seen not just as a key phase in the history of anthropogenic climate change, but as a workshop in which the intellectual tools for diagnosing and contesting this problem were tested.
My recent and upcoming courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene (linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change") have helped me workshop some of these ideas. The working title comes from Hopkins:
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh.
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
--G.M. Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
--G.M. Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland
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An essay that sketches some of the project's main lines, "After Death: Christina Rossetti's Timescales of Catastrophe," has appeared in Nineteenth Century Contexts, and is available in the PDF at right.
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"My task is done." Smudged fragment on mourning paper. Emily Brontë, 1844 (Berg Collection, NYPL).
Streetside wreckage. Kashmere Gardens (Houston), two weeks after Hurricane Harvey. 9.16.2017, photo by the author