Embedded Temporalities: Interspecies Life Narratives in a Time of Permacrisis

Bernhard Malkmus, University of Oxford

January 29th, 2026, 12-1.30 PM EST

 Register for the webinar here.

Excerpts from the recently published German-language memoir and travelogue Himmelsstriche (https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/buch/himmelsstriche.html) on North England and Scotland will be offered in translation to create a sounding board for reflections on narrative practices of deep time, place-making, and interspecies entanglement. Through a combination of showing specific aesthetic practices and reflecting on their potentials and/or shortcomings, this reading-cum-lecture engages with the challenges nature writing faces in an age of permacrisis. It discusses the potential of certain narrative modes (1) to implicate readers in temporalities beyond human time scales; (2) to create a sensibility for expressions of life beyond the paradigm of visual domination; and (3) to dramatize the ontological ‘unappropriability’ (Unverfügbarkeit) of nature. The latter aspect is often ignored in new nature writing and ecocritical theory, which are predominantly concerned with the biological continuum between humans and other-than-human lifeforms. Implicating an ethical/deontic human being into narratives, however, requires a more differentiated approach: Attentiveness to biological morphology and metamorphoses are a way of staying with the trouble in an age of extinction without reduplicating the modern fallacy of regarding human lifeworlds as existing outside ecological realities. The aesthetic principles arising from this attentiveness centre around practices of Gestalt and “zarte Empirie” (Goethe) and ethics of acknowledgment and Lassenkönnen; they can help us engage in a form of mourning work that gives agency to other-than-human lifeforms under threat – and thus reflect our own vulnerability. In so doing, they aim to develop an ethos of the creaturely as a shared mode of inhabiting a reality increasingly shaped by ecological permacrisis.

On the Author:

Bernhard Malkmus taught at OSU from 2007 till 2017 and is now professor of German and Environmental Humanities at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on Goethezeit and Modernism, on environmental ethics and the implications of the Anthropocene for the humanities. Currently, he is working on a literary history of the Great Acceleration.

As a nature writer and poet he aims to develop a form of nature aesthetics commensurate with the moral predicaments of the human condition in an age of ecological precarity. His most recent publications are a cultural history of the lynx, Luchse: Ein Porträt (2023), and Himmelsstriche: Vom Leben der Vögel und Überleben der Menschen [Flight Lines: Of Avian and Human Homing Instincts] (2025).

Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene

Gabriele Dürbeck, University of Vechta 

April 28th, 2025, 12:15-1.45PM EDT

The lecture will take a look at natural archives (e.g. fossils, glacier, tree rings) as unintentional earth-historical traces and their role in the natural-cultural memory and their practices of reading, collecting, preserving, interpreting and affecting cultural narratives of climate change. The first part gives insight into the theory of a natural-cultural memory with respect to the dimensions of materiality, multiscalarity of different time scales, multispecies entanglements, and mediality. The longer second part applies these findings to examples of contemporary narrations, such as Robert Macfarlane's renowned book Underland. A Deep Time Journey (2019) that represent glaciers as Earth memory, and Susan Schuppli's ethnographic and meditative film Ice Cores (2020).

For more information on the project, see: https://www.uni-vechta.de/en/natural-cultural-memory-in-the-anthropocene/natural-cultural-memory