The Anthropoceneâwhat a word! One of the most-discussed and widely received concepts in academia today, most of all in the environmental humanities, the Anthropocene and its many and often contradictory implications invite closer scrutiny. This is no less true for its educational implicationsâfor the practices of reading, teaching, and making meaning of literary fiction. Originally suggested as a geochronological period to the scientific community by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer at the turn of the millennium, conceptual discussion from its beginnings has been not merely descriptive but has entailed a deliberate call for a consideration of the normative ramifications of humankindâs impact on the earth system. And it quickly came to encompass both fantasies of human exceptionalism and superiorityâin the form of research on geoengineering, sayâand a critique of human cultural practices, epistemologies, and ontologies. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, these critiques were grounded, on the one hand, in non-anthropocentrism (as in Donna Harawayâs suggestion to speak of a âChthuluceneâ) as well as more traditional Marxist thought (Jason Mooreâs âCapitaloceneâ) and called into question the onto-epistemological practices of the sciences in the Western Hemisphere, pointing to incongruities and âalternative modernitiesâ in the Global South. At the same time, however, they radically generalised the idea of humanity in idealist, often even imperialist ways (âthe humanâ as a global agent is a generic singular par excellence). In challenging scientific and academic practices of understanding the earthâs as well as our human past, present, and possible future, the concept of the Anthropocene continues to probe the boundaries, and seeks to explore new ways, of ontological and epistemological but also political, historical, and environmentalist inquiry. And, by implication, it asks us to rethink the narratives that accompany, and with which we try to make sense of, the current situation. It thus also calls for a questioning of (the underlying premises of) educational practice: the role of storytelling, for instance, as well as the significance, fluidity and situatedness of knowledge. This book will try to embrace rather than dissolve the multiple tensions that come with Anthropocene discourse and take them as the starting point for a discussion of the role of narrative and literature pedagogies in times of uncertainty and fundamental, global change: Anthropocene f(r)ictions .
Writing on one such set of frictionsâpostcolonial history and climate changeâDipesh Chakrabarty notes that âthe current conjuncture of globalization and global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at oneâ (2012, 1). In the same vein, Timothy Clark describes current attempts to measure and overview the new reality of extensive and widely distributed human agency as an exercise in âscalingâ that will inevitably lead to the experience of a âderangement of scalesâ, or âAnthropocene disorder â (2015, 144), in which âa feeling of a break-down in the senses of proportion and of propriety when making judgmentsâ takes a hold of, and possibly immobilises, our thinking about the world. Addressing the problems of such scale effects for reading practice, he points to the fact that â[n]o finite piece of writing can encompass a topic that seems to entail thinking of almost everything at oneâclimate, culture, politics, populations dynamics, transport infrastructure, religious attitudesâ (78). But, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf and Donna Haraway at once, âthink we mustâ. How, then, are we to conceive of the role of reading and storytelling in a world that suddenly seems to be both too smallâthink âglobal villageââand too large, as the images and metaphors currently in use when it comes to describing the Anthropocene suggest? In this book, I will engage in what Patrick D. Murphyâs calls a âtransversalâ reading practice: a form of reading that mobilises âa dialogical relationship between the abstract and the concrete, the theory and the practice, the concept and the applicationsâ (2013, 4). Literature pedagogy, in other words. At the same time, I want to complicate the idea that we simply move between the intellectual worlds of thought and the more hands-on aspects of educational practice because if both the conceptual and the political worlds we find ourselves in are tension-ridden, inexplicable by any master narrative or trope and bound to lead to âAnthropocene disorder â, as Timothy Clark dubs it (2015, 139), a new notion of what âunderstandingâ means seems to be required. Wolfgang Welsch (1995) has entertained a similar thought and suggested âtransversal reasonâ as a form of thinking that brings together seemingly disparate discourses and discourse logics. Likewise, Hubert Zapf, in his take on cultural ecology, stresses the importance of discursive plurality and of an understanding of ecology as (also) a form of thinking in connections, and he arrives at a model of literature as a form of cultural ecology that derives its power precisely from the tensions and contradictions upon which fictional discourse relies and which it brings into fruitful interplay (Zapf 2016, see also Kagan 2013).
I want to add another facet to this discussion and suggest that paying attention to the processes of scaling described by Clark and others is of invaluable importance for knowing, or getting to know, earthâs natural-cultural worldsâand for learning about them through the practice of reading and engaging with narratives. It is through the âscaling of perspectivesâ, I hold, that we can transform the notion of a cultural ecology of word and world into a âtranscultural ecologyâ of a diversity of word-and-world practices. And it is a transcultural competence in this sense towards which modern education (Education for Sustainability, Intercultural Education as well as Inclusive Teaching) should be geared. It is the aim of this book to outline some of the ways in which this could be done. For that, I will, after a brief introduction of key terms and tenets, analyse a number of contemporary, âworld-literaryâ texts and their enmeshments with and critique of the Anthropocene master narrative. Each reading will be accompanied by a section that points to central concepts and learning activities that might bring the literary potential of fiction to bear productively on the educational situation in which literature pedagogies are situated. I am not at all interested in the âmoralâ or âmessageâ of the texts in questionâa practice frowned upon for some time now in academia yet still widely employed in both secondary and tertiary educationâbut understand these texts as invitations to rethink thinking and refashion what it means to be reading through the very act and event of reading. This is why, instead of a gist at the end of each chapter in which I summarise my own interpretive results, I have opted for a GIST section: it is through some remarks on General Implications for Studying and Teaching that I wish to identify and discuss aspects, elements, and potentials of the texts under discussion in a spirit of openness towards the frictions and ambiguities they produce.
This choice also explains why the present book is neither a work of literary theory nor an educational textbook but a hybrid tool for speculation and exploration. In qualitative social research, empirical data are collected in order to generate analytical categories for the sake of a flexible and circular research epistemology (Creswell 2013). I will try to adapt this process and understand the literary texts I am discussing as such generators of categories. If it is in literary texts that potential for understanding and transformation can be found, a âqualitativeâ reading in the context of literature pedagogy might benefit from close scrutiny of the knowledge configurations that literature provides (Ette 2017, 223). In his WeltFraktale (âWorldFractalsâ), Ottmar Ette suggests a âpathway through the literatures of the worldâ that lets go of the idea of unity and closure and embraces the âpolylogicalâ potential of literatures instead (2017, 57, my translation). What he describes as a ârelational philologyâ (69) has at its disposal both a political and a critical potential that can and should be utilised in the present situation. There is an educational demand for reconfiguring our engagements not only with the world but with the cultural forms through which we make sense of our environments. The âscaling of perspectivesâ tries to account for this demand and make productive use of the ongoing and increasing ambivalences inscribed into Anthropocene experiences. This is because in the end, âunderstandingâ the Anthropocene demands a heightened readiness to embrace what Keats has dubbed ânegative capabilityââthe state âwhen man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reasonâ, a âcompetenceâ as it were that modern educational methodologies still value greatly and discuss under the moniker of âtolerance of ambiguityâ, and about which I will speak in more detail later (see Keats 2002, 41â42 as well as Bartosch 2013, 12; Hall 2016, 459). Tolerance and negotiation of ambiguity is a very apt description of the role and potential of literature pedagogies in the twenty-first century, in an age of climate change as well as other, related crises.
In order to make this case, this book needs to link such educational hopes with the more technical notion of competence acquisition. Literature pedagogies, like other subfields in language teaching and particularly in ELT/EFL (English Language Teaching/English as a Foreign Language) methodologies today, are bound up with the concept of competences and competence acquisition.1 Problematic and disputable as the notion of competenceâand the allegedly natural implications of, for instance, measurability and applicability of a set of soft skills in the spirit of vocational trainingâmay be, it forms part of a discourse that has to be reckoned with and, if possible, dealt with productively (see Witte 2011). Before I move on to my main argumentation in the next chapters, let me therefore sketch some of the central posits in the discussion of competences in the context of literary education and, most importantly, intercultural learning, which provide the main thrust for my case for transcultural competence and transcultural ecology.
Originating in the 1960s with the main objective of familiarising increasingly multicultural communities with âhabits, norms, values, taboosâ (Grimm et al. 2015, 157) of what was perceived as alien cultural groups (without effectively calling into question the hegemonic values of the majority), intercultural learning and intercultural competence today refer to both global business communication and a more subtle but also much more nuanced pedagogic aim of bringing together hermeneutics and cultural difference in an ongoing negotiation of alterity (Bredella 1996; Gonçalves Matos 2012; Witte and Harden 2015). Pedagogic work in this area is extensive, and I cannot do justice to the many important contributions, especially in the context of models of âunderstanding alterityâ (Fremd...