Geostories: Literature and the Elements II (Earth)

This course includes a mandatory field trip and special events. Please see dates below. 

This course will conclude on December 17.

In March 2024, after 15 years of intense and public deliberation, the International Union of Geological Sciences voted against the formal adoption of “the Anthropocene” as a new geological epoch to mark the irreversible human impact on planetary climate systems over the past centuries. However, the introduction of the term had struck a nerve and has become an extremely productive and influential travelling concept between the sciences and humanities to help frame human-environment relations in times of climate catastrophe, species extinction, biodiversity loss, environmental racism, and industrial resource extraction. Suddenly “humanity” was understood as an agent at geological timescales, and earth systems had become vibrant actors in the unfolding of planetary geostories. 

In this seminar, we will take the convergence between the human and the geologic as a starting point to trace what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “human-lithic enmeshments” through literature and the arts. What does it mean to become geologic? How do we tell the stories of rocks and minerals as agents in more-than-human economies, ecosystems, metabolisms, pasts and futures? How do we engage a geopoetics attuned to the timescales of mountains, stones, and plate tectonics? Can we make kin with the earth’s crust? What are the colonial geologics of extraction, transformation and distribution at work in the alchemy of petroculture and fossil capitalism? How can we find the lithic in us and the living in the stone?

As the second installment in the “Literature and the Elements” seminar series, which started with a focus on water in the winter of 2023, this course will revolve around site-specific and practice-based engagements with stories of our lithic, petric, and geologic relations. A key feature of this seminar is an interdisciplinary field trip to Lausche (Zittau Mountains) with Dr. Jörg Büchner, a geologist from the Senckenberg Museum Görlitz, and colleagues and students from the TUD geography department. This trip will take place on October 18 and is mandatory for all participants of this course. In dialogue with theoretical frameworks such as elemental ecocriticism, environmental media theory, the lithic humanities, petrocultures, Critical Indigenous Studies, and feminist materialisms, we will spend the subsequent weeks encountering selected examples of geostories in literature and the arts to, ultimately, create our own Carrier Bag of Geostories. This course requires an openness to be creative and to experiment with various modes of artistic research creation. 

To familiarize themselves with these themes, prospective students are encouraged to have a look at this curated collection of examples and quotes on “geologic subjectivity” from theory, literature, and art: Geologic Subjectivity: A Speculative Glossary of Earthly Estrangements in Theory and Fiction.

The regular course slot is Tuesday, 14:50-16:20 (see dates below), with select, mandatory special events. The number of participants is limited, please only enroll, if you can make it to all special events:

This course will, moreover, feature a workshop with the artist Sophie Lindner on Nov 12. 

The course will conclude on December 17 (no sessions in 2025).