This talk explores literary ecological imaginaries in a moment that Thomas Friedman in The New York Times named “global weirding” in 2010, exploring the dual way in which "the Weird" has come to be understood as both a mode of re-signifying global warming, and as a modernist literary mode going back at least to the early 20th century. Tracing weird fiction’s role in earlier philosophical accounts of the Anthropocene to the current moment of weirdness as a primary imaginative vector along which environmental catastrophe and transformation is explored, “Weird Worlds and Otherwise” will ask about what it means to rethink Anthropocene encounters through contemporary weird fictions and theories of weirdness that imagine weird affects or aesthetics at the limits of representation. Taking its title cue from James Tiptree Jr.’s essential collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), this talk looks to both Old and New Weird texts from H.P. Lovecraft to N.K. Jemisin to account for how visions of weirding worlds reflect (or purposefully fail to reflect) our changing environments. What does a concept like "global weirding" and weird fiction itself open up for thinking about the incomprehensible temporalities and unpredictable effects of living in and through the effects of climate change?
About the presenter
Alison Sperling lives between Berlin and Tallahassee, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin, and a Junior Faculty Fellowship at Technische Universität Dresden. She researches in the fields of science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, contemporary art, and ecology, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rhizomes, Girlhood Studies, Paradoxa, Studies in the Fantastic, interconnections: journal of posthumanism and elsewhere, as well as in over a dozen book chapters, artist monographs, and in exhibitions internationally. She is the editor of “Climate Fictions,” a special issue of Paradoxa, and is currently co-editing “The Anthropocene Sublime” with Ecozon@.
The Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture series
The Anthropocene is a widely used term that designates the most recent epoch in Earth's history: an epoch in which humans have radically altered (and disrupted) the climate and ecosystems of the planet.
The annual Welcome to the Anthropocene lecture series invites scholars and researchers across the humanities, social and natural sciences to explore how their disciplines are responding—both to the concept of the Anthropocene, and to the planetary crisis that it designates.
For the 2024 Anthropocene Lecture Series we've invited leading international scholars. Read more about the other lectures in the series here.
2024 Convenors and organizers: Sara Asu Schroer and Anna-Katharina Laboissiere.
How to attend
The 2024 lecture series are free and open to the public. You can either attend in person at the University of Oslo or on Zoom. Register in advance to join.