Abstract

Abstract:

This essay examines the relationship between midcentury cultural production and the cluster of problems—growth, energy use, the relation of human/nonhuman nature—that now fall under the term “Anthropocene.” I begin by considering some of the methodological questions the Anthropocene has generated for literary studies. Then, I turn to Len Lye’s short film The Birth of the Robot (1936) and J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). Lye’s and Ballard’s aesthetic practices dissolve abstract boundaries between nature and culture and offer images of worlds where nature is no longer the opposite of what is made but is both an object made by humans and a human-making force.

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