Atmospheric Experiences of Place in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract This article offers the first extended English-language reading of Amalie Smith’s De næste 5000 dage (2010) through the concept of atmosphere, arguing that mood functions not merely as an aesthetic effect but as a mode of ecological knowledge in the Anthropocene. Intervening in current debates within ecocriticism and new materialist theory, the article shows how literary atmosphere renders the entanglement of cultural imaginaries, infrastructures, technologies, and nonhuman forces perceptible at the level of embodied experience. Drawing on Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s theorization of Stimmung and Bruno Latour’s attention to heterogeneous mediation, the article traces a spiral movement across the book’s six texts – from the Danish west coast, through Copenhagen’s urban and digital spaces, to a collective account of an earthquake in Malmö. Close readings demonstrate how the summerhouse’s apparent stillness is materially produced through coastal engineering, how urban environments generate anthropocentric and machinic moods of compression and self-reflection, and how seismic disturbance reasserts atmosphere as collective, more-than-human presence. The article contributes a refined vocabulary for understanding atmosphere as relational and historically situated, bridging aesthetics and ecocriticism by treating mood as a site where form, matter, and affect converge. By foregrounding atmosphere as an analytical category, it positions Smith’s second book as an atmospheric map of the Anthropocene and suggests how literary texts can recalibrate attention toward the nonhuman conditions that structure contemporary experience.