Come celebrate the launch of Christopher Schaberg's new book, SEARCHING FOR THE ANTROPOCENE:A Journey into the Environmental Humanities.
"Moving nimbly between personal narrative and academic theory, Christopher Schaberg locates the Anthropocene in compelling, illustrative sites--from the sand dunes of his Michigan childhood where he gathered stones derived from 350-million-year-old coral to the new billion-dollar airport terminal being built, ill-advisedly, just above sea level in his current home of New Orleans. This is an elegantly-written book that guides us through the dizzying epiphanies of scale, co-implication, and self-recognition that the Anthropocene concept demands." -Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
Debated, denied, unheard of, encompassing: The Anthropocene is a vexed topic, and requires interdisciplinary imagination.
Starting at the author’s home in rural northern Michigan and zooming out to perceive a dizzying global matrix, Christopher Schaberg invites readers on an atmospheric, impressionistic adventure with the environmental humanities. Searching for the Anthropocene blends personal narrative, cultural criticism, and ecological thought to ponder human-driven catastrophe on a planetary scale.
"This book is not about defining or settling the Anthropocene, but rather about articulating what it’s like to live in the Anthropocene, to live with a sense of its nagging presence--even as the stakes grow higher with each passing year, each oncoming storm.Christopher Schaberg wanders Michigan’s north woods and far flung airfields to ferret out the absurdity of the ‘Anthropocene’. Schaberg shows how Homo sapiens are no longer in charge of anything, despite our terrifying and irreversible wounding of a planet reeling from climate change. It’s a coin-toss whether there will be anything around at the end of the next decade capable of reading this fine book." —Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years (1996) and Walking It Off
Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013) and The End of Airports (2015) and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.
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"Christopher Schaberg embarks on a captivating personal journey that effortlessly weaves experiences in the natural world with the unresolved landscapes of the Anthropocene. He's a competent guide through the quixotic stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to tame a future that terrifies us." -Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions