This week’s theme is deep time. We’ll be discussing the introduction to a recent special issue of Environment Humanities on “Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time” (May 2018). This essay conceives deep time as “an intimate and compelling element woven into our everyday lives” and outlines different ways of engaging with deep time and the Anthropocene in the humanities. We’ll use these ideas as a starting-point to think about how/whether texts from our own research engage with deep time.
Reading:
Franklin Ginn, Michelle Bastian, David Farrier and Jeremy Kidwell, “Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time.” Access online: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385534
Time & Place:
14:00-15:30, Wed 23 Jan 2019
Shackleton Room (Arts 439)
Thinking about deep time is challenging; deep time is strange and warps our sense of indebtedness to earth forces and creatures past, present, and future. Alienation is perhaps the most logical reaction to sublime, inhuman timescales. Confronted by stretched-out temporal horizons, the human figure is marginalized, decentered as measure of all things. (“Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time.”)
Image: Photograph from Michael Heizer’s “City” (1972-) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/michael-heizers-city
About the Doctoral Seminar:
This is an informal weekly reading group run for postgraduates within the Department of English Literature. We select a short text to read in advance, often a work of theory, then meet to discuss it. The seminar provides an opportunity to consider aspects of the reading that were thought-provoking or challenging for you, think about how it relates to texts you may have studied or plan to read, and share aspects of your own research and academic practice. It’s also a chance to get together, try out ideas, and meet fellow postgraduate researchers. There will be tea, coffee and biscuits and you are very welcome!
