International Conference “Elemental Voicing: Techniques and Aesthetics of a More-Than-Human-Literature”
Organisers: Eva Horn, Sebastian P. Klinger, Vera Thomann
A Look Back on the concluding event of the research project “Landscape, Life, Form: Anthropocene Poetics in Contemporary German Fiction”
On 3-4 July 2025, researchers from Europe and the US came together in Vienna to explore the techniques and aesthetics of a more-than-human literature.
Our two-day conference marked the conclusion of a research project initiated in 2020 by VAN founder Eva Horn to investigate the aesthetics of Anthropocene poetics in contemporary fiction.
The talks by Hartmut Böhme, Klaus Mladek, Gabriel Trop, John Durham Peters, Eva Horn, Sebastian P. Klinger, Vera Thomann, Teresa Kovacs and Antje Schmidt ranged widely across literary history—from reflections on ancient Greek and Roman texts to German Romanticism, the early beginnings of science fiction around 1900, and finally contemporary theatre and Anthropocene poetry.
In their individual talks, our speakers reflected on the notion of “elemental voicing”, wondering how fire, water, earth and air could be understood as speaking, agential entities. In his keynote “The Voice as a Special Home for Gibberish,” John Durham Peters approached these reflections on a fundamental level, asking what constitutes a voice and how human speech differs from more-than-human—and even cosmological—utterances. A recording of his keynote is available below.
We would like to take this opportunity to once more thank our brilliant guest speakers and everyone in the audience for their participation. While the conference wraps up our research project on Anthropocene Poetics, we look forward to continued explorations of the Anthropocene from a cultural and literary studies perspective.
The Voice As a Special Home for Gibberish
Keynote by John Durham Peters (Yale)
Presented at the international conference "Elemental Voicing: Techniques and Aesthetics of a More-Than-Human Literature"
3-4 July 2025, Vienna
The project is generously funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), 2020-2026.