Peacock, Laurel. “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 1 (November 2012): 85–102.
In the Anthropocene, it is no longer an “intentional fallacy” to attribute human emotions to the environment or its elements. Affect is vital in understanding human motivations in relation to climate change, and California poet Brenda Hillman’s ecopoetic practice is an example of how we can shift our understanding of our affective relationship to the environment. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is used throughout the article as a way to conceptualise this interrelation of human with environment: SAD suggests that in this era human and environment alike are disordered. Rather than staging a lyric subject regarding a landscape, Hillman’s poems create a confusion of subject/object and foreground/background relations in which the origins of affects are impossible to determine and harms circulate. — Adapted from the author’s abstract.
© Laurel Peacock 2012. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).