Human Scale: Utopia in the Era of Climate Change
Benjamin Morgan, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, will present, “Human Scale: Utopia in the Era of Climate Change,” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 27, in McCosh Hall, Room B14 (Hinds Library). A reception in the Thorp Library will follow.
Morgan will explore how art and literature try to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. Global warming, ocean acidification, and extinction are happening extremely quickly at a geological time scale, but these disasters look slow or distant from the human perspective. Morgan argues that this “scalar disjuncture” originates with British industrialization and earth sciences. He shows how literary and cultural forms, such as the naturalist novel, utopian literature, the panorama, or decadent aesthetics, developed formal strategies for fusing together human and inhuman scales of time and space.
This event is hosted by the Victorian Colloquium in the Princeton Department of English and co-sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute.
Human Scale: Utopia in the Era of Climate Change
Event Date
Tue, Nov 27, 2018 ・ 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Presenter
Benjamin Morgan
Location
McCosh Hall Room B14 (Hinds Library)
Benjamin Morgan, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, will present, “Human Scale: Utopia in the Era of Climate Change,” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 27, in McCosh Hall, Room B14 (Hinds Library). A reception in the Thorp Library will follow.
Morgan will explore how art and literature try to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. Global warming, ocean acidification, and extinction are happening extremely quickly at a geological time scale, but these disasters look slow or distant from the human perspective. Morgan argues that this “scalar disjuncture” originates with British industrialization and earth sciences. He shows how literary and cultural forms, such as the naturalist novel, utopian literature, the panorama, or decadent aesthetics, developed formal strategies for fusing together human and inhuman scales of time and space.
This event is hosted by the Victorian Colloquium in the Princeton Department of English and co-sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute.
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