Writing Nature from the Sublime to the Anthropocene

Catalog description

Explores different ways that nature-writing has been conceptualized and practiced (whether in essayistic, poetic, or philosophical modes). Beginning with the 18th-century concept of the Sublime and ending with the Anthropocene (the age we are thought to be living in now), our discussions will move through several key epochs in order to consider how the cultural imagination has shapedand has been shaped byshifting understandings of the relationship between humans and nature. Ultimately, we will invite all of these texts to address themselves to us in our own ecologically fraught moment, asking: what does it mean to engage in nature-writing when facing a natural world whose fate often seems to have already been written?