Journal Article

Comparative Critical Perspectives on the Anthropocene: An Introduction

Johns-Putra, Adeline, Shen, Xianmin

2023

Overview

[...]those vulnerabilities lie with both human and nonhuman individuals: the Anthropocene demands that human-nonhuman as well as intra-human injustices are dealt with, that the ways in which global systems are interlocked with planetary ones are properly understood. Anthropocene Criticality: The Planetary, the Global, and the World What kind of Anthropocene criticality would be both an act of recognition of human responsibility and a reckoning across boundaries (whether intra- or interspecies) of agency, power, and vulnerability? Cheah argues that the original \"effete idealist\" (26) account of world literature as Weitliteratur as put forward by Goethe, which offers an educative, cosmopolitan, and ultimately unifying function, has been replaced with a more pernicious celebration of the circulation and exchange of texts and ideas; this, however, ignores the market realities of trade and commodification that underwrite the traffic of texts. [...]globalization and worldliness are conflated in a way that ignores \"the vulnerability of world literature to the techniques of the global culture industry\" (30), writes Cheah.

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: Exceptionalism / Geology / Globalization / Humanities / Literary criticism / Postcolonialism / World literature