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The Romanthropocene
Author(s) -
Ford Thomas H.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12464
Subject(s) - neologism , anthropocene , meaning (existential) , romance , reflexivity , history , psychology , linguistics , literature , philosophy , art , epistemology , sociology , anthropology , environmental ethics
The Romanthropocene is a neologism that names the transits of meaning which shuttle between the terms it joins together. I explore this complex of meaning by retracing the histories of its component lexical, semantic, and conceptual elements. The word Anthropocene is constructed from two etyma, anthropos and cene , which first acquired their current sense in the Romantic period. The Anthropocene then brings together a Romantic conception of geological time with a Romantic conception of human cultures as empirical objects of naturalist study. While the history of the word Romantic is better known, it too merits retelling in the Anthropocene epoch. Its reflexive naming of the textualisation and historicisation of nature reads differently now that the human spirit has impressed its law on all earthly things. I would call the approach taken in this paper ecophilology , but one polysyllabic neologism per paper is probably more than enough already.