Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

When do literary forms serve projects of human flourishing and when do they reinscribe old violences? If literary forms have the power to articulate new imaginations and, by extension, new modes of being, what then is the political and pedagogical utility of literary form in the twenty-first century Anthropocene? How does one’s relationships to a metaphysical ‘home’ create conditions of possibility for new forms or the politically motivated resurrection of old ones? Finally, what happens to form when home is displaced, dispossessed, violently colonized, or—in the case of the Anthropocene—rendered unlivable by the ghosts of human actions, themselves motivated by logics of extraction and legacies of colonialism? This paper places Gyorgy Lukács’ Theory of the Novel in conversation with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth to explore these questions. I contend, as Ghosh suggests, that the conditions of the Anthropocene represent a return to an immanent world not unlike that of the classical epic in which self and (G)od(s) experience no separation and the boundaries between inner and outer; past, present, and future are blurred and fluid. I close with a proposal for and preliminary examples of a new literary form, the non-logocentric epic (NLE), a visual poetic hybrid grounded in the interrogation of “masterly” looking and decolonial praxis. This paper borrows methodology from elemental media, Black Studies, and comparative analysis.