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“Man in the Anthropocene”: Max Frisch's Environmental History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Bernhard Malkmus
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Abstract

The aesthetic practices in Max Frisch's late story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene [1979]) lend themselves to a reflection on the current global environmental crisis and its anthropological and epistemological repercussions. Frisch's visual and narrative artwork anticipates central issues in the current Anthropocene debate, in which the humanities have made incisive interventions. I bring these interventions to bear on close readings of Frisch's intermedia aesthetics, unearthing an environmental reflexivity that revolves around issues of time and history, place and identity, nature and human knowledge, metamorphosis and anthropogenic transformation. I thus invite us to reconsider in the light of the anthropological and sociopolitical imaginaries of the Anthropocene some ways in which the literature of the past half century has negotiated the relation between human beings and their natural environments.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 71 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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