Sebastian Egholm Lund: Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Fiction, and the Anthropocene?

Nicole Seymour

Metamodernity and the State of Environmental Comedy

This talk will track five major shifts within the contemporary U.S. comedy landscape, with an eye toward how those shifts pertain to environmental issues. These five include a turn away from satire on the part of progressive environmental artists and a rise in what Seymour and her political scientist collaborator term “conservative camp”—or the Right-wing adoption of aesthetic modes typically associated with the queer Left. Seymour will explore the factors behind these shifts, including the rise of the affective regime that scholars have termed “metamodernity.” She will offer an illustration of metamodernity through close readings of recent cli-fi novels that bear its hallmarks, then conclude with a discussion of what environmental art might look like going forward.

Nicole Seymour is professor at California State University, Fullerton (US), and fellow at Center for Applied Ecological Thinking. Seymour specializes in environmental cultural studies with a particular focus on queer ecology, affective ecocriticism, and environmental justice. Key publications include Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen og Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

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