Deadline: 30.05.2025
Contact: Alexandra Juster, University of Innsbruck
Email: Alexandra.Juster@uibk.ac.at

The planned anthology is intended to provide an inspiring framework for an intensive examination of legal impulses and drafts in literature on the Anthropocene. Legal drafts, ideas, utopias and fantasies in climate fictions, theory and reality narratives (see below), in constitutive narratives (see below) or other literary and non-literary formats on the topic of the Anthropocene can be discussed. The results of the reflections will be compiled in an anthology.

Contextualization

According to Gabriele Dürbeck, the term Anthropocene refers to
a new geological age in which humanity has the dominant geophysical influence on the Earth system and from which human responsibility for the future of the planet is derived. The concept also contains a call to redefine mankind’s position in relation to nature and the cosmos and to deal responsibly with limited natural resources. 1
There can be little doubt that, at least since the Second World War and at the latest since the fall of the Berlin Wall (Bruno Latour), there has been a strong acceleration of the damaging effects of human activity on the Earth system. This worrying observation has led Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to proclaim the age of the Anthropocene. 2
Over the last two decades, more and more literary and non-literary texts have been dealing with the planetary and life-threatening development for humans and nature, commenting on it, making predictions, reporting facts, conveying scientific findings, processing facts into fiction, designing
dystopian end scenarios and much more. Many of these texts contain legal problems, questions and shortcomings, but also proposals, ideas and drafts for legal answers, which are conveyed explicitly or implicitly. When Andri Snaer Magnason in Water and Time. A History of Our Future (2021) proposes to introduce the term ecocide, this may lead to considerations on a legal level as to how such a proposal could be implemented. When Gabriele Kiefer introduces the energy passport in her novel Platz der Engel (2019), , this could also lead to legal creativity. In addition to explicit suggestions, implicit drafts of new legal regulations can also be taken up. For example, in Die Welt kippt (2022), Heiko von Tschischwitz puts forward the idea that capitalism could be encouraged by law to counter the environmental problem. Bruno Latour insists on the end of the dialectic between man as subject and the earth as object6 : such a perspective opening could encourage us to reflect on the status of the ‘legal subject’, or even more generally, on a state of emergency due to the urgency of the situation. In L’Hypothèse K. (2023), Aurélien Barrau calls for the prioritization of environmental catastrophe as a subject of research : this could lead to reflections on the regulation of science. The list of possible sources of inspiration is long.
From a literary studies perspective, such legal discourses can be found in literary fictions, theoretical narratives, constitutive narratives, non-literary narratives of reality and much more. While fictions can, but do not have to, incorporate real facts, reality narratives, according to Christian Klein and Matías Martinez, refer solely to real events. Normative narratives of reality are particularly suitable for legal discourse: “In this type, a desired state of reality is described with the aim of regulating a certain (social or individual) practice, which is done through exemplificatory representations (human actions)”.
Stefan Böschen and Willy Viehöver propose the theory narrative as a narrative form that is capable of connecting different fields of knowledge in an interdisciplinary way: “A theory narrative is about the construction, configuration and interpretation of objects of knowledge. The plots told are about the configuration of epistemic perspectives, qualities and virtues, in which the interpretative competence of a knowledge culture is expressed in the treatment of its objects and demands epistemic authority”.
Simon Probst sees the constitutive narrative of the Anthropocene as a possible form of critical narrative on the constitution of the world that focuses on the referentiality of man/nature.

Contributions are welcome that take up and explicate the explicit and implicit legal discourses in literary and non-literary texts on the Anthropocene. I am particularly interested in highlighting the interdisciplinary link between literature on the Anthropocene and law, in the sense of literature as a ‘suggestive’ source of law, in order to show the extent to which literature points to legal gaps and/or possible legal answers.

Posted on May 29, 2025