Ecocriticism

Abstract

Abstract Over the last two decades, the Anthropocene and its calamitous signatures of climate upheaval, species loss, and biocultural fragmentation has garnered dedicated attention from ecocritics, ecologists, and the public. As the culmination of a fifteen-year scientific process, however, in early 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences, or IUGS, rejected the Anthropocene as a unit of geological time in favour of a view of the Anthropocene as a temporally transgressive event. Prominent within the year’s work are trajectories in empirical ecocriticism, ecocritical ageing studies, intermedial ecocriticism, and blue ecocriticism, all of which place emphasis on agency, narrativity, and temporality. As the example of the blue humanities reveals, explored in this essay’s conclusion, intersections between ecocriticism and emerging areas of the environmental humanities continue to generate novel directions. The expansion of interdisciplinary research engaging ecocritics, social scientists, ecologists, and geoscientists is a potential outcome of the IUGS decision. As ecocriticism evolves in the era of the Anthropocene as an event, concerns of more-than-human agency, expression, and creativity will likely attract greater focus. In addition to presenting a broad overview of publications, each of the sections below hones in on one specific work. This review of ecocritical publications in 2023 comprises six sections: 1. Introduction: The Anthropocene from Epoch to Event, which contextualizes the IUGS’s refusal to ratify the Anthropocene as an official geochronological designation; 2. Ecocritical Directions: Towards More-than-Human Agencies, which focuses on the special issue of the journal Anthropocenes, ‘Life Out of Place’; 3. Empirical Ecocriticism: Appraising Environmental Narratives, which considers the landmark edited collection Empirical Ecocriticism; 4. Ecocritical Ageing Studies: Rethinking Narratives of Decline, which turns to the edited collection Aging Studies and Ecocriticism; 5. Intermedial Ecocriticism: Diversifying Anthropocene Narratives, evaluating Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose’s monograph Intermedial Ecocriticism; and 6. Conclusion: Ecocritical Agency and the Environmental Humanities, which reflects on developments in the blue humanities.