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SoSe 22: S-Culture-Gender-Media: Non-Human Temporalities

Peter Löffelbein

Kommentar

Time and its passage are recurring themes in literary and cultural studies. In recent years, scholars have maintained that, rather than being a natural given, time is shaped by technological, economic and political forces, being inseparable from human configurations and perceptions. Accordingly, literary scholarship and cultural studies have redirected their focus toward temporalities, that is, the multiple ways of experiencing, conceptualising, and representing time.

This course explores the idea of temporal experience in relation to the non-human: the temporalities of animals, plants, minerals, material objects and natural phenomena as well as the ways they have been represented in literature. What are the temporal rhythms, scales and ‘life-spans’ of non-human entities and phenomena, and how can they be described? In what ways are human and non-human temporalities thought to overlap, to collide, or to engage with each other? Does it even make sense to separate one from the other, or in which way would we have to rethink the entanglement of human and non-human temporalities in an era marked by the challenges of a global pandemic and looming climate catastrophes – phenomena in which biological, social, climatological and political temporalities collide?

Together, we will explore these questions in reference to select theoretical approaches and literary texts – the latter ranging from Old English writings to the works of Shakespeare to texts from Edmund Gosse (1907), Susan Sontag (1992), Thomas Powers (2018), and others.

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