ecology

Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis

When In These Times launched in early 2017, it gave voice to a collective sense of shock, a need to connect scholarship with activism and “engage, engage, engage.” Since then, contributors have offered a range of thoughtful reflections on how to study and teach modernism and modernity in these catastrophic times. But until recently the forum has been unsettlingly silent on the climate crisis—even as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, record-breaking floods and wildfires proliferate, droughts threaten crops and ecosystems, glaciers continue to melt and coral reefs to bleach, and a million animal and plant species face extinction at heartbreakingly accelerated rates.

The Meteorological Device: Literary Modernism, the Daily Weather Forecast and the Productions of Anxiety

If we were to attempt a history of the end of history, of how the conceptualization of the modern state produced the now familiarly assembled phenomena of governmentality, globalization, and climate change, then we would do well to look at the history of the modern weather forecast. There are several good reasons for this.

First, most generally, any such history of science returns the epistemological foundations of the present to the anthropology of modern scientific culture, enabling a comparative perspective on how environmental knowledge is gathered and used. Second, modern weather science represents a systematic understanding o

Corrosive Littoral: On the Beach with Kenneth Slessor

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself. According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream: “Legitimacy is a raw and buried issue in the contemporary Australian consciousness for good reasons.

Modernism, Energy, and Environment

Critical, speculative, and imaginative forays into modernism’s relationships with energy systems, ecological change, and the nonhuman world. 

Modernism, Energy, and Environment

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work.

Green Screens, or Watching Flowers at the Cinema: Realism, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Time-Lapse Film

Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible.

—Walter Benjamin, “News About Flowers”

This Chaotic Earth: On Clarence Larkin’s Charts

The apocalypse stressed me out. This is an obviously true, maybe irresponsibly glib statement in material terms—the sixth extinction, global pandemic, nuclear annihilation, space rocks, methane farts, these all terrify me daily in ways that I have the luxury to be terrified.

Béla Bartók’s Dissonant Ecologies: Nonhuman Sound in Bluebeard’s Castle

In a 1907 letter to Stefi Geyer (the young violinist for whom he wrote the First Violin Concerto), Bartók writes: “It’s not the body that’s mortal and the soul that’s immortal, but the other way around. The soul is transitory and the body (that is, matter) is everlasting! . . . The body, as matter, is ‘immortal’ indeed, for matter in this world is never lost; it only changes its form” (Béla Bartók Letters, 76, emphasis in the original). Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1918; first version, 1911) can be read as an attempt to give expression to the idea of “immortal,” as well as agential, matter, beginning with the castle itself. The drama of the opera revolves around the opening of the castle’s seven doors by the light-bringing human characters, Judith and Bluebeard, leading to the inner chamber. Here Judith becomes absorbed into the object world of the castle as Bluebeard simultaneously becomes swallowed by the closing “night forever” of the opera’s final curtain. The sweating, weeping, sighing, bleeding, and shrieking castle was originally conceived by librettist Béla Balázs as the third character of the opera: it is both a noisy environment into which the characters are thrust and a sonic agent in itself, its “voice” (and the discordant voices of its objects) as central to the opera as those of its human characters.