TODAY
Dr. Dana Phillips – Sabbatical Presentation
3 p.m. in LA 4317
This paper will ask whether posthumanism might not be the “proper” point of view for evironmental history and thus for ecocriticism as well. It will ask that question by exploring the uncanny effects of adopting a posthumanist outlook on the fate of human culture insofar as that fate is shaped by environment, and vice-versa. This exploration will take as its centerpiece several popular narratives of “collapse,” including Jared Diamond’s 2005 book of that title and Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature. Each of these narratives records dire threats to and the possible extinction of human beings, while insisting that those anthropoids are complicit in their own demise. A posthumanist environmental history and ecocriticism might afford the perspective needed to understand, if not to circumvent, this irony, as well as allowing us to gain some badly needed critical distance from the doomsday narratives we find so compelling.
