Table of Contents

Anthropocenic Turn?—An Introduction

Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

Section 1: Creating Knowledge in the Anthropocene

Chapter 1

The "Material Turn" and the "Anthropocenic Turn" from a History of Science Perspective Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Chapter 2

The Anthropocene and the History of Science

Jürgen Renn

Chapter 3

The Dirty Metaphysics of Fossil Freedom

Franz Mauelshagen

Chapter 4

Oriental Wisdom for the Planet? Thoughts on Asia and the Anthropocene, with Special Emphasis on China

Hannes Bergthaller

Section 2: Narrating the Anthropocene

Chapter 5

Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic

Bernhard Malkmus

Chapter 6

Scaling, Modelling, Teaching: The Anthropocene from a Literature Pedagogy Perspective

Roman Bartosch

Chapter 7

Dating the Anthropocene: Why Deciding on a Start Date for the Most Recent Geological Epoch Matters

Philipp Pattberg and Michael Davies-Venn

Chapter 8

When Humans Become Nature

Bernd Scherer

Section 3: Sensing the Anthropocene

Chapter 9

Latency, Entanglement, Scale. Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene

Eva Horn

Chapter 10

The Urgency of a New Humanities: Sensing the Anthropocene as a State of Exception

Gregers Andersen and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen

Chapter 11

Filming through the Milieu. Becoming Extinct and the Anthropocene

Julia Bee

Chapter 12

Seeds—Boundary Objects of the Anthropocene

Alexandra R. Toland

Chapter 13

The Garden and the Cloud: Art, Media, and the Dilemmas of the Anthropocene

Serenella Iovino

About the Author

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at the University of Vechta. Her research includes German literature from the 18th–21th century, postdramatic theater, travel literature, postcolonialism, ecocriticism and narratives of the Anthropocene. She has authored "Ambivalent characters and fragmented poetics in Anthropocenic literature (Max Frisch, Iliya Trojanow)" (The Minnesota Review, 2014) and co-authored "Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene" (Ecozona, 2015). She is co-editor of Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (Böhlau, 2015); Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (Lexington, 2017); Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Literatur (Metzler, 2017); Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts—neue Perspektiven und Ansätze (Peter Lang, 2018); Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien/Representing the Anthropocene in Literature and Media (Peter Lang, 2019).

Philip Hüpkes is research assistant at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, and a PhD-candidate (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck) at the University of Vechta. From 2017 until 2019, he was employed as research assistant in the DFG-funded research project Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature. Themes, Structures, Poetics at the University of Vechta. His research interest lies in issues of scale and (media-)aesthetics in the context of the Anthropocene, as well as in philosophies of perception, process ontology, and, most recently, in artificial intelligence. Recent publications include: "Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem" (Der Anthropos im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung, de Gruyter, 2020); "Anthropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and Deep Time in the Anthropocene" (Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, Cambridge Scholars, 2019); "‘A New Political Body Yet to Emerge’: Zur Darstellbarkeit des anthropos in Bruno Latours ‘Kosmokoloss. Eine Tragikomödie über das Klima und den Erdball‘" (Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien/Representations of the Anthropocene in Literature and Media, Peter Lang, 2019).