“Hamartia in the Anthropocene”

Traditionally tragedies take place over a limited period of time, with blasphemous transgressions provoking immediate repercussions. But the tragedy of environmental disaster operates to a different timescale, with our crimes already committed but the consequences not yet fully experienced. How does the Aristotelian notion of hamartia work in the Anthropocene? In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh has claimed that climate change is unthinkable because literary writers have failed us. In this lecture, I’ll respond to Ghosh’s challenge and explore Greek tragedy literally from its non-human ground up to think how the ancient imagination might offer us ways of reading the environmental emergency we face. In particular, I’ll focus on the relations between the human and more-than human worlds, on concepts of time and on ideas of probability and the unexpected. 

Jennifer Wallace is the author of Tragedy Since 9/11: Reading a World Out of Joint (2019), The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007), Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004), Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (1997), and one work of fiction, Digging Up Milton (2015). She teaches English and Comparative literature at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. 

Photo (c) Robert Wallis.