Event date: Monday 4 November 2019, 5.30 – 7 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“Nature Repairs Our Ravages? George Eliot’s Novel Ecosystems”; given by Prof. Jesse Oak Taylor (University of Washington)

Abstract

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. … To eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.” These lines, from the end of George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), take on new resonance amidst the emergent catastrophism of the Anthropocene, when the devastating flood that lies in the offing throughout the novel becomes an anticipation of the storms yet to come. The novel was published the year after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and is set in a water mill in the 1830s—the decade that saw industrial capitalism switch from water power to steam. It explicitly situates its narrative against a backdrop of geologic time, presents its characters as “specimens,” presents culture and mythology as records of geomorphology, and thematizes the turn to fossil capitalism as an acceleration of history. It thus aligns with the emergence of the Anthropocene, both in terms of a material phase shift within Earth’s history and the conceptual apparatus that make it visible. This talk will seek to understand that uncanny synchrony by considering Eliot’s novel as an experiment in what I call Earth System Poetics, unpacking the entanglement between humanist world-building (both the realist novel and scientific understandings of the human-as-species) and the simultaneous human intervention in the Earth System via the scaling up of imperial/industrial modernity. In so doing, it will explore the novel’s role in cultivating a humanism for the Anthropocene, in which the residues of history must be understood in relation to an emergent—potentially calamitous—futurity.

Bio

Jesse Oak Taylor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016), which won both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) book award for ecocriticism and the Rudikoff Prize for a first book in Victorian Studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA), co-editor, with Tobias Menely, of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017). He is also co-author, with Daniel C. and Carl E. Taylor, of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change (2011), and one of the facilitators of an interdisciplinary research cluster on the Anthropocene funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.