Workshop and Guest Lecture :Wie imaginieren wir die Umwelt und die Umweltkrise? (How do we imagine the environment and the environmental crisis?)

We are glad to announce that Prof. Dr. Sabine Wilke (University of Washington) will be the guest lecturer at our summer-term reception 2013. She will speak on the topic of “How do we imagine the environment and the environmental crisis? Texts and images from the Anthropocene”. The event starts at 6 pm in the Festsaal (Schloss).

The seminar with Prof. Dr. Wilke takes place 30th of April 2013 in the Senatssaal from 10 am until 4pm. It is open to all graduate students of the GSPoL and PK LitG, external guests are invited to register with the coordination office.

The workshop and the lecture both focus on ecocriticism. By means of selected texts and images from European cultural history, we will explore the main points of the paradigmatic imaginations of the environment in Western civilizations. This begs the question of how cultural production depicts environmental problems; how do we represent pollution and contamination, climate change, the growing rate at which entire species are extinct, in short: How do we imagine the Anthropocene? If we we live in a an age that sees humanity as an active force of nature, ultimately reconstructing the very basis of our environment, we want to see what the Anthropocene looks like, and how literature and culture react to this phenomenon.