This blog accompanies the international, trilingual (German-English-French) conference, “Geschichte/n schreiben im Anthropozän – Writing (Hi)stories in the Anthropocene – Raconter des « Histoire.s » dans l‘Anthropocène”, which will take place in Constance (Germany), 4-6 September 2024. Prof. Dr. Achim Landwehr (Constance), Dr. Anna-Lena Eick (Mainz) and Dr. Tom Vanassche (Aachen) organise the conference. Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck (Vechta) and Prof. Dr. Ewa Domanska (Poznan/Stanford) will hold the keynote lectures. The other presenters teach, think and write at Austrian, Belgian, British, Cameroonian, German, Finnish, Irish, Japanese and Turkish universities.
The topic of the conference is the difficult dialogue between ‘objective’ historiography, based on the extensive study of primary sources, and its (more or less conscious) rhetorical constitution, which dates back to Aristotle and has regained momentum in the late 20th century. More specifically, we assert that global warming and the Anthropocene warrant revisiting these fundamental matters: what will historiography, written by those who acknowledge these new epistemological conundrums, look like? We suspect that the aesthetic liberties of literature and other artful narrative forms (film, TV series, visual arts) will widen the field and enable the formation of a new historiographical tradition. As a seismograph of this evolution, literature and art deserve our full scholarly attention. The conference aims to address broad questions: how can a literary/artistic historiography emancipate itself from the premises of traditional historiography? What possibilities do literature and the visual arts offer for the formation of alternative historiographies? Which possibilities exist to escape from the dilemma of modernization? The answers to such questions should also address the effects on the self-consciousness of a critical historiography and, as such, evaluate the relation between literature and history. Aside from matters of legitimacy, with which a literary historiography will undoubtedly be confronted, we also aim to discuss the question of potential synergies between literary studies, history, theory of history, aesthetics and other contiguous fields of study – both synchronically and diachronically.
The three conference organisers will contribute as authors and editors to the blog. Every blog post will be available in German and English. We wish to draw attention to the conference, announce the participants and refer to relevant new publications (not necessarily restricted to the participants’). The blog will also serve as a protocol of the conference. The blog’s intended audience includes the conference participants, but ultimately addresses anyone interested in the implications of the Anthropocene for the anthropological act of storytelling. Those implications impact the task that the humanities should set themselves in the face of planetary catastrophe: of making sense of the mess that we’re in and the consequences for ‘the’ human condition in the twenty-first century.