Archiving the Human: Toward a Textual and Contextual Approach to American Literature in the Anthropocene

This methodologically innovative project is the first to systematically engage state-of-the-art theoretical reflections on the Anthropocene in analyses of a significant and representative sample of contemporary American literature. The geological notion of the Anthropocene has in recent years become an increasingly prominent research paradigm in the humanities and the social sciences. In the study of literature, and especially the field of ecocriticism, research has so far mainly foregrounded the ecological dimensions of the notion and largely neglected its potential for methodologically innovative literary analysis. This project fills this methodological gap by conceptualizing literary activity in the Anthropocene as a practice of archiving human life. Building on a systematic interdisciplinary study of recent archive theory, it develops an integrated notion of the archive that it then deploys in a series of textual analyses of clusters of contemporary American novels. Cumulatively, the theoretical and analytical parts of the project make the Anthropocene available as a crucial encompassing new context for contemporary American literature.