Abstract

With the increasing interconnectedness of nature and culture in the Anthropocene, new narratives about humanity’s past, present, and future have been emerging. This is associated with a restructuring of cultural memory in the context of Earth history. To contribute to a better understanding of these changes, this paper takes recourse to approaches from Memory Studies. In a post-humanist extension of Memory Studies, the so-called archives of nature (sediments, fossils, ice cores, tree growth rings, corals) are described as the material basis of a natural-cultural memory. The concept of natural-cultural memory refers to the totality of cultural practices and institutions which make the archives of Earth history accessible and thereby constitute a culturally significant time horizon. A crucial question here is how the interplay of cultural archives and the archives of nature as repositories of the past contributes to the specific functioning of natural-cultural memory and which commonalities and differences are constituted in the process. The article develops the general outline of a theory of natural-cultural memory through a comparative analysis of Esther Kinsky’s poetry collection Schiefern (2020) and Robert Macfarlane’s travelogue Underland. A Deep Time Journey (2019). As a result, it becomes clear how literary texts of the ›self-conscious‹ Anthropocene reflect on memory processes in a deep-time context, albeit its continuity is threatened by the cumulative effects of human activities.