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In March of 2024, a panel of expert straitographers answered the question of whether current human actions on the planet have resulted in the beginning of a new epoch, “the Anthropocene,” with a resounding “no,” thus seeming to close the book on a debate two decades, many ice core and sediment samples and temperature charts, and innumerable articles, essays, films, anthologies, and monographs in the making. We remain, they concluded, in the Holocene. Dueling experts immediately questioned this assertion, and the Anthropocene is unlikely to be abandoned so easily, given the concept’s explanatory power for so many scholars interested in contemporary environmental concerns. As Rob Nixon has noted, the Anthropocene has become an intellectual "cavernous maw," drawing in converts and critics from across the disciplines, including literary studies, and generating a robust and diverse scholarly conversation on the place of the “Anthropos” on the planet. 

Taking this opportunity as a moment for a reflective pause in the frenetic pace of cultural production on this subject, this course will reassess the Anthropocene as a concept, asking what work it has authorized, what kind of thinking it has produced, and what kind of action it has encouraged. Though our texts will be contemporary, students are welcome to pursue the concept in other eras. (Scholars have, after all, set the origins of the Anthropocene as early as 1610.)