Karen Pinkus: Narrative, Time, and Decarbonization

This talk will take place in person and online.

My talk will move between literature and climate policies or technologies aiming to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To be sure, there may be some natural overlap: policy papers often invoke “stories.” And some variants in the growing field of cli-fi make reference to geoengineering or carbon credits (usually with disdain). But what I am proposing today recognizes literature beyond “a story” or “characters” in a planning scenario; literature that has nothing to do with climate change as a theme, composed of language that is not instrumental put into conversation with economic and engineering logics. My thought experiment may indeed fail, radically, but in its failure, it might also be revelatory.

Speaker: Karen Pinkus is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is author of numerous works on Italian culture, film, architecture, and literary theory. Beginning in 2005, she has been one of the pioneers in the field of environmental humanities and climate change. Among her publications are Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), “Crystalline Basement,” (e-flux, with artist Hans Baumann), and her most recent book Subsurface.

Jointly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the School of European, Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) and UCL Anthropocene, with generous support from the Cornell/UCL Global Strategic Collaboration Fund.