Registration does not begin until 02.10.2026 at 08:00. It ends on 12.10.2026 at 23:59.

If your registration for this course is successful you will registered automatically for the course Literatur im Zeichen des Anthropozäns: Formen, Verfahren, Narrative - S (Kevin Drews).

This course focuses on the history, theory, and literary and artistic representations of “planetary experimentation.” The Anthropocene is itself a concept of planetary experimentation, having been described as a condition that is the result of “a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” or as an “unintended experiment of humankind on its own life support system.” Alternative terms such as the Capitalocene or Plantationocene stress that a small subset of humans, rather than “humankind,” are responsible for this experiment, yet also present phenomena such as global warming and rapid species extinction as signs of irresponsible planetary experimentation. This course focuses on theories of “planetarity,” considering especially the role of concepts of experimentation in these theories. We will also draw on work in science and technology studies (STS), while keeping in mind that planetary experiments tend not to fit easily into usual understandings of experimentation as lab-based, replicable, etc. In addition, we consider non-scientific theories of experimentation, and explore ways in which different literary genres and artistic projects understand planetary experimentation (for example, via fictions about explicit planetary experiments, such as geoengineering or the intentional global spread of nanotechnologies, as well as fictions about responses to unintentional planetary experiments, such as accidental release and global spread of a technology or virus). We will focus especially on how literature and art projects imagine or instantiate agency, expertise, and responsibility, and consider how these accounts compare to science and technology studies accounts of planetary experiments. The guiding premise of the course is that the history and language of planetary experimentation can open up contemporary discussions of engineering and technical solutionism to a critical history of politics, truth, and aesthetics.

: This course is intended to enable students to understand the history of concepts of the planetary and to make distinctions among these concepts; to understand different concepts of scientific and non-scientific experimentation, and to apply these to concepts of the planetary and the Anthropocene (and Capitalocene, Plantationocene, etc.); and to apply all of these theories to the analysis of literature.

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