# Event Details

- **Event Name**: "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina
- **Event Start and End Date**: Mon, 09 Mar, 2026 at 05:30 pm
- **Event Description**: "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina (Malta).

Date: 5.40pm, 9 March
Venue: Faculty of Arts Library, University of Malta

Abstract:
I begin from what has been described as a “planetary turn” (Elias and Moraru, 2015): an intensified reckoning with interconnectedness and interdependence across human and non-human worlds that unsettles established modes of thought and compels us to imagine new forms of relationality. Central to this turn is what Timothy Clark (2012) calls the “derangements of scale”: the disorienting recognition that familiar human frameworks are insufficient to account for planetary processes and for the unsettling agency of the nonhuman.

From this starting point, I ask what it might mean to speak of a “planetary essay”, or, more suggestively, to essay the planetary in the etymological sense of the essay as attempt, trial, or experiment. The essay has long been associated with the reflective human subject, with the singular “I” as locus of perception and thought. Planetary thinking, by contrast, stretches across temporal and spatial scales that exceed ordinary comprehension and destabilise anthropocentric frameworks. How, then, can the essay be planetary? 

In response, I argue not only that the essay can and has registered planetary tensions – sometimes in unlikely contexts – but that planetary thinking itself is structurally essayistic. To think the planetary is to proceed by approximation and conceptual testing rather than by system or mastery. In this sense, the essay does not merely accommodate planetary ‘content’ or ideas, but it can also mirror planetary method.

I pursue this argument through readings of essays by Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, and Annie Dillard, alongside Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a novel that, in functioning as a thought experiment about planetary scale, becomes essayistic in its mode of inquiry. These texts, I argue, enact a form of imaginative dwelling of the planetary, and, in them, the essay can be read as an experimental form adequate to thinking at the limits of scale – a mode through which non-anthropocentric planetary awareness becomes thinkable, if never fully knowable.

Bionote:
Mario Aquilina is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Malta, where his work focuses on the essay, literature, literary theory, and writing. His current research centres on the essay, and he has published widely in essay studies. His work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals including Oxford Literary Review, CounterText, Electronic Book Review, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and Life Writing. Aquilina is the author of The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), editor of The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (Bloomsbury, 2021), and lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay, a field-defining reference work in contemporary essay studies. He is the Academic Lead of Essays Beyond Borders, an Erasmus+–funded international project (2024–2026) bringing together European partners to explore the essay as a transnational, planetary, and pedagogical form.
- **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/msida/essaying-the-planetary-the-essay-and-non-human-scales-a-public-talk-by-prof-mario-aquilina/200029787196937
- **Event Categories**: Art, literary-art, Nonprofit
- **Interested Audience**: 
  - total_interested_count: 0

## Ticket Details


## Event venue details

- **city**: Msida
- **state**: MA
- **country**: Malta
- **location**: University of Malta
- **lat**: 35.902211579921
- **long**: 14.482700336188
- **full address**: University of Malta, University of Malta, Tal-Qroqq,Msida, Malta

## Event gallery

- **Alt text**: "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina
  - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events10/banners/552365443e67c03ddf3f0f17e4cc9b1fcf5aeab40382832c98c52c7bffc1c871-rimg-w1200-h676-dcffffff-gmir?v=1772984257

## FAQs

- **Q**: When and where is "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina being held?
  - **A:** "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina takes place on Mon, 09 Mar, 2026 at 05:30 pm to Mon, 09 Mar, 2026 at 05:30 pm at University of Malta, University of Malta, Tal-Qroqq,Msida, Malta.
- **Q**: Who is organizing "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina?
  - **A:** "Essaying the Planetary: The Essay and Non-Human Scales", A Public Talk by Prof. Mario Aquilina is organized by English at UM.

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