Gastvortrag – Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf: Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature

The paper discusses the role of literature in relation to the general archives of culture from the perspective of cultural ecology. It will (1) comment on the place of literary studies within the transdisciplinary framework of the Environmental Humanities; (2) look at how the ecocritical turn in literary studies has changed the ways we are dealing with the literal and metaphorical archives of our disciplines; (3) outline some basic ideas of a cultural ecology of literature and address the ways in which literature acts as an ecological force in culture; and (4) trace the agency of the ecological archives of literature, which are reaching back into deep-time memories of culture-nature-coevolution, as sources of imaginative energy in examples from German and American literature.

Hubert Zapf is Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is an Advisory Board Member of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment, of the Lexington Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series, Rowman & Littlefield, and of the Elements in Environmental Humanities Series, Cambridge University Press. His publications include Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie, Niemeyer, 2002; Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte (ed.), Metzler, 3rd ed. 2010; American Studies Today: New Research Agendas (co-ed.), Winter, 2014; Literature and Science (ed.), Special Issue of Anglia 2015; Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (ed.), 2016; Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts, Bloomsbury, 2016; “Ecological Thought and Literature in Europe and Germany”, A Global History of Literature and Environment, Cambridge University Press: 269-285, 2016; Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (co-ed.), Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.