Lecture
Georgetown Humanities Initiative “New Work in Global Justice” Series: Aaron Rosenberg (King’s College, London),”Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel: Extreme Measures”
This workshop will feature Dr. Aaron Rosenberg speaking informally about his new book and outlining the importance of scalar thinking to the international environmental humanities today. At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale’s value as a measure of reality. Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres—romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-—it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The talk will suggest that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it.
An informal presentation by Dr. Rosenberg will be followed by a moderated open discussion led by Nathan Hensley (English, Georgetown). Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to nathan.hensley@georgetown.edu to help with food orders.
This event is part of a collaborative working group linking Georgetown and King’s, on the topic of “The Unfinished Nineteenth Century: Environment, Race, and Culture.” Rosenberg’s appearance is cosponsored by the “New Work in Global Justice” series hosted by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative.