from Prologue - Earth, Anthropocene, Literary Form
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2021
How are we to make truthful statements, depictions or communications about a changing world? A fact is not an actuality but a statement about actuality; data are not given but captured and communicated; communication modifies the actuality it describes. We have many tools at our disposal – journalistic and essayistic, photographic, scientific – with which to name and depict things that are too big, too small, too fast or too slow for human perception. This chapter suggests that they share two fundamental procedures: abstraction and anecdote. The former culls large-scale dynamics from massive collections of data; the latter seizes on unique instances of the confluence of forces. Can an investigation of truth-practices in stories, reports, diagrams and images give us tools to redirect the changes we know we are experiencing but for which the means of expression seem suddenly ineffectual?
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.