The Age of Humans Meets Posthumanism: Reflections on Don DeLillo's Zero K

Abstract

The scientific community disagrees over the date of the beginning of the Anthropocene. According to William Ruddiman, who proposed the “early Anthropocene” hypothesis, the onset of this era can be located some eight thousand years ago. The Anthropocene Working Group, set up by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and also supported by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term in 2000, has suggested that the Anthropocene was ushered in by the Industrial Revolution (c. 1800 CE) (see “Anthropocene,” “Anthropocene Working”). Alternatively, the dawn of the Nuclear Age in the mid-1940s has been pinpointed as the dawn of the Anthropocene. Regardless of its still debatable origin, the concept itself can be applied productively for cultural and literary analysis. As a yet informal scientific term that still needs to be validated, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch marked by a new scale of human activity and agency that follows the Holocene. It highlights the extent of the impact of human activities—global and irreversible—on the state of our planet, especially on climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation. Taking into consideration the steep rise in the damaging effects of industrial development on the environment since the middle of the twentieth century, scientists have also identified the Anthropocene as the age of “Great Acceleration.”1 There are social and literary critics, however, who dissent from using the term Anthropocene but share a similar view on the status quo and a similar insistence on