Lecture on Climate Counteraesthetics: Middling Mediations In A World Ablaze

Surveying some aesthetic, epistemic, and political deadlocks in debates in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism, this talk highlights a few generic and popular modes that constitute climate counteraesthetics - counterintuitive, counterhegemonic, and counter to the poles of the deadlocks.  Embracing those modes dialectically diverts from the disintermediated extremes of didacticism and indeterminacy, moving towards new critical esteem for the mid.

Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice" series 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). In addition, her essays have appeared in venues including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray. 

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Film & Media, Berkeley Center for New Media, Program in Critical Theory, and the Townsend Center