Poetics of the Earth: Deep Time, Material Archives, and Diffractive Methodologies of Interpretation 1500-SDN-PZ
The seminar is devoted to Poetics of the Earth, understood as contemporary interpretive practices that approach literary texts and cultural phenomena through the perspectives of deep time, material archives, and the relational agency of matter. It is grounded in the premise that geology should not be regarded solely as an object of the natural sciences but also as an interpretive category that enables the reading of cultural texts in relation to planetary, material, and temporal processes extending far beyond the scale of human experience.
Particular attention will be given to the concepts of deep time, the geological turn, material archives, distributed agency, and relationality, which have reshaped contemporary approaches to literary and cultural interpretation. Rocks, minerals, sediments, dust, and fossils will be examined not as passive elements of the environment but as material archives preserving traces of geological, biological, and cultural processes.
The seminar is grounded in Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology and explores the possibilities of diffraction as a research practice. Participants will examine the differences between diffractive reading and more established interpretive models, including hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction, and traditional ecocriticism, while developing their own research strategies based on relationality, intra-action, and the material-discursive constitution of phenomena.
Interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar combines literary studies with perspectives drawn from philosophy, the geohumanities, Anthropocene studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities. Readings will include literary texts, essays, and selected works of visual and contemporary art engaging with geology, rocks, minerals, the Earth, catastrophe, and planetary processes.
The seminar aims to equip participants with original methodological tools and to encourage critical reflection on the application of geopoetics and diffractive methodology within their own doctoral research projects. It is designed to foster advanced research skills and support the development of innovative humanities scholarship that integrates literary analysis with questions of materiality, planetarity, and deep time.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of the seminar, the doctoral student:
• demonstrates advanced knowledge of contemporary methodological debates in geopoetics, the geological turn, the environmental humanities, new materialism, and diffractive theory;
• understands the significance of the concepts of deep time, material archives, relationality, intra-action, and material-discursive agency for contemporary humanities research;
• is able to critically compare different models of interpreting literary and cultural texts identifying their methodological assumptions, strengths, and limitations;
• is able to apply diffractive methodology and geopoetic approaches independently in the interpretation of literary texts and other cultural phenomena;
• is able to design original research strategies that integrate literary studies with philosophical and environmental perspectives, and to justify methodological choices in a rigorous and coherent manner;
• is prepared to conduct interdisciplinary humanities research that engages with questions of materiality, planetarity, and deep time;
• is able to adapt and further develop contemporary humanities methodologies within the framework of their own doctoral research, formulating original research questions and critically evaluating their analytical potential.
Assessment criteria
writing a short essay
Bibliography
• Alaimo, Stacy, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington 2010.
• Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham 2007.
• Barad, Karen, On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, „differences” 23 (3), 2012, s. 206–223.
• Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham 2010.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago 2021.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (ed.), Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, Minneapolis 2015.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, Lowell Duckert (eds.), Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, Minneapolis 2015.
• Fiedorczuk, Julia, Paweł Piszczatowski (eds.), Places That the Map Can’t Contain: Poetics in the Anthropocene, Göttingen 2023.
• Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham 2016.
• Ingold, Tim, The Life of Lines, London–New York 2015.
• Latour, Bruno, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge 2017.
• Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis 2013.
• Piszczatowski, Paweł, Chthonic Shards: Paul Celan’s Poetics of Earth, Göttingen 2026.
• Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham–London 2016.
• Yusoff, Kathryn, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis 2018.