ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT
David Higgins dialogues with Maria Alterno and Richard Pareschi (madalena reversa) and the activists of Friday for Future Roma.
Moderates Clara Ciccioni.
British scholar David Higgins, author of the first eco-critical study of the relationship between Romanticism and climate change – British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene – analyses the works of writers such as Lord Byron, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley in relation to the global cooling produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. In these texts the powerful sublime of the Alpine landscape and the vulnerability and insignificance of human communities are emphasised as contrasting elements. The way Romantics considered environmental catastrophes as the consequence of complex interactions between human and non human agents is today an instructive lesson to better understand the current ecological crisis.
Higgins will meet Short Theatre’s audience remotely, conversing with Maria Alterno and Richard Pareschi (madalena reversa), authors of the performance Rømantic Disaster, and the activists of Friday for Future Roma. They will propose a radical criticism of anthropocentrism that includes a historicised approach to Anthropocene, through a geohistorical and neomaterialist view.
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David Higgins, British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene. Writing Tambora, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2018.
