“Monsters ask us to consider the wonders and terrors of symbiotic entanglement in the Anthropocene.”
(Tsing/Swanson/Gan/Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 2017)
The times when it needed a mad scientist to sew together body parts and flip a switch to (re-)animate a monster are long gone. Today’s monsters are – if not invisible – hard to make out, or rather, they resemble their surroundings and their creators so much, it’s hard to call them monsters and not mean ourselves. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Well’s Moreau, both equally genius and mad, have been replaced by well-meaning teams of progress-driven scientists. In consequence, their monsters, with their clear-cut boundaries, discernible impulses, and, most importantly, narratable origin story, nowadays seem like reasonable (if ugly) non-humans and strange pets.
Today’s monsters rarely have an origin, that is, no one ever intended to ‘create’ them, yet, they wreak havoc on human civilization. The hybrid human-animals from Dr. Moreau’s island, indeed, seem much easier to deal with than a radioactive reptile like Godzilla, genetically modified killer plants, or, perhaps the most unsettling of all: global warming. With a growing human influence on global ecosystems and a seemingly uninhibited human drive to control ‘nature’ by all means, catastrophe and monster enter an uncanny relationship that implicates humans. In my talk, I will look at contemporary monsters in fiction and beyond and ask how their particular form and capabilities (or lack thereof) form what we perceive as our environment or even world. I will confront Timothy Morton’s concept of “dark ecology” with Donna Haraway’s “sympoesis” and probe how they inspire modes of co-existence with ‘our’ monsters.
Solvejg Nitzke is a postdoctoral researcher of literary and cultural studies at TU Dresden where she leads the research project "Making Kin with Trees" funded by Fritz Thyssen Foundation. She received her doctorate in German literature at Ruhr-University Bochum (2015). Her dissertation (Die Produktion der Katastrophe: Das Tunguska-Event und die Programme der Moderne, transcript 2017) deals with the challenges a seemingly inexplicable or even unexplainable event like the Tunguska-Explosion (1908) poses to the “programs of the Moderns,” i.e. scientific practices, cultural beliefs and story-telling. During her postdoc at Vienna University (2015-2017), Solvejg Nitzke worked on the relationship between climate (change) and story telling. She has published on monsters, ecological storytelling, (post-)apocalyptic narratives, village stories, the theories of scaling and the cultural significance of “whole earth” imagination; her research focuses on human-plant relationships, especially arboreal metamorphoses.
Select Publications:
- Imagining Earth: Concepts of Wholeness in Cultural Constructions of Our Home Planet, ed. with Nicolas Pethes (Columbia University Press, 2018)
- Cultures of Climate: On Bodies and Atmospheres in Modern Fiction, ed. with Eva Horn, Ecozona 11/1 (2020)
- “The End of the World that is not One: Writing about Earth as Hyperobject”, in: Hannes Bergthaller, Arndt Niebisch (eds.): "Climate Change, Complexity, Representation," Metaphora 23/2 (2017)
This event is taking place in the context of SCCT 510, a course on "Monstrous Ecologies" co-taught by Chris Cokinos (English) and Joela Jacobs (German Studies) for the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory GIDP.
