Searching for the Epicentre: Witness in the Anthropocene
摘要
This concluding chapter discusses issues around sites of witness in the context of the inescapable catastrophe of the Anthropocene and goes on to problematise the notional subject/object divide. It also tests the applicability of Carolyn Forché’s definition of the poetry of witness, as construed in the twentieth century, against the human and nonhuman experiences of life in the current moment of the twenty-first century. Finally, it offers a holding position regarding the possible role of poetry at this point when we are all first-hand witnesses to multiple environmental disasters, and poses the question of what we might do with that status, however unwelcome it may be.