Beyond Narrative Time and Space:

Lyric Worlds in the Anthropocene

This project investigates how the concept of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch in which human activity has become a dominant force shaping Earth's systems, presents significant challenges for narrative representation. The story of human-induced climate change unfolds across vastly different timescales: the relatively brief span of human history and the deep time of planetary processes. Reconciling these incongruent temporal frameworks requires new modes of thinking and expression. One approach to this challenge is rhetorical. The project explores how the lyric mode, characterized by introspection, immediacy, and a heightened attention to affect and perception, can be brought into dialogue with the narrative mode, which typically emphasizes linearity, causality, and temporal progression. This rhetorical interplay offers strategies for re-situating human experience within a broader planetary context. Building on Jesse Matz’s concept of “time-work,” which views narrative as a site for transforming our experience of time, the project extends this idea to include spatial dimensions as well. It argues that lyric, with its capacity to foreground moments of perception and relationality, can complicate conventional boundaries between human and geological domains. In doing so, it provides interpretive tools for articulating the complex temporal and spatial dynamics of climate change. Ultimately, the project proposes that lyric space-time, understood as a rhetorical framework rather than a poetic genre, can help make the planetary dimensions of climate change more intelligible and communicable. It offers new ways to see and express what is otherwise difficult to grasp.

Connected works:
“Landscape Rhetoricity: Narrative, Ecology, and Topographic Form.” Narrative 32.3 (October 2024): 244–259.

“The Rhetoric of Emergence in Narrative.” Diegesis, Special Issue on Narrative Theory in the Anthropocene 9.2 (December 2020): 80–95.

“Lithic Space-Time in Lyric: Narrating the Poetic Anthropocene.” Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism, edited by Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Marcussen, and David Rodriguez. Routledge, 2021.