The thesis

This thesis examines Danish author Theis Ørntoft's literary construction of the Anthropocene in the poetry collection Digte 2014 (2014) and his debut novel Solar (2018). Through a literary analysis informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty's "The Climate of History: Four Theses" (2009) and Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement (2016), the thesis argues that Ørntoft does not merely poeticize the theorists' Anthropocene concepts: he takes a step further.

In Digte, this exploration is actualized through a two-tracked synesthetic engine, temporal and spatial, that constructs a literary Anthropocene in which a Chakrabartyan species-perception emerges within a "deep" temporal frame, simultaneously challenging Ghosh's modern narrative grid. In Solar, the central structural figure is the narrator's personality split between voyeur and exhibitionist. This split reflects humanity's broader role in the Anthropocene: voyeurs, spectators of our own destruction, and exhibitionists trapped in cycles of vanity and progression.

Through three game motifs analyzed via Ghosh's grid, the thesis argues that Solar displaces the modern literary grid onto the screen. This marks the thesis's most original contribution: where thinkers like Stephen Kern have previously read the railway and telegraph as configurations of modern temporal and spatial experience, this thesis argues that Ørntoft poeticizes the screen as their Anthropocene equivalent.

The thesis was supervised by Frederik Tygstrup, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. Tygstrup is a specialist in the European novel and in literary and cultural theory, and his research ranges across literature and space, geography, aesthetics and intellectual history. His recent books include Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary (Goldsmiths University Press, 2024) and Infrastructure Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2025).