Anthropocene Affordances: Scale, Narrative Form, and the Human in Us-American Literature

The current historical moment, often referred to as the Anthropocene, is defined by profound human influence on the planetary system. Lena Pfeifer examines how contemporary US-American literature negotiates the political, ethical, and epistemological challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Connecting new formalist approaches with theories of scale, she develops the concept of Anthropocene affordances as a new methodological framework for analyzing narrative responses to the recent ecological crisis that reconfigure conventional forms and narrative strategies to critically discuss the role of the human as a geological force.

Lena Pfeifer received her doctorate in American Studies/Environmental Humanities at Universität Würzburg, where she has been working as a research assistant since 2021. Her research focuses on how literature and culture respond to the ecological crisis.