The Department of English will host a book talk by Timothy Sweet on “Extinction and the Human” Oct. 29 at 3:30 p.m. in 130 Colson Hall and via Zoom. The talk is free and open to the public.
The Department of English will host a book talk by Timothy Sweet on “Extinction and the Human” Oct. 29 at 3:30 p.m. in 130 Colson Hall and via Zoom. The talk is free and open to the public.
In “Extinction and the Human,” Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales and the North American bison—beginning with the moments that these species' extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives: transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical and scientific accounts and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors.
“If the Sixth Extinction is a hyperobject, an event so massively distributed in space and time that it cannot be experienced directly,” he writes, “these cases of particular megafauna have nevertheless consistently commanded our focus and attention. They form a starting point for a coherent, approachable history.”
Find more information about Sweet.
Contact Marsha Bissett at marsha.bissett@mail.wvu.edu for the Zoom link.