{"id":63,"date":"2018-11-20T16:05:46","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T16:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/?page_id=63"},"modified":"2019-01-15T20:59:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T20:59:48","slug":"action-after-nature-climate-crisis-and-the-force-of-literature","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/action-after-nature-climate-crisis-and-the-force-of-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"2\/25: Action After Nature: Climate Crisis and the Force of Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nathan Hensley, Associate Professor of English (Georgetown University)<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Alice falls into Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, she wonders how anything in the world will ever feel normal again. In this lecture, Hensley draws on the experience of Alice and other 19th century literary figures to sketch how it feels to live at the tail end of a long history of climate crisis. With our upside-down contemporary world in view, the talk will trace our climatic unwinding from its origins in nineteenth century coal extraction to our moment of capital intensive “tight oil” and shale gas fracking. The goal will be to show how poetic and literary thinkers from this long modern period –Lewis Carroll; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the Bront\u00eb sisters among them– invent new languages, poetic resources by which we might begin to imagine, and then to create, a just and livable future.<\/p>\n

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty<\/em> (Oxford 2016). He is also the coeditor of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire<\/em> (Fordham 2018), and co-director the 2016-2018 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar, “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change.” He was born and raised in Fresno, California.<\/p>\n