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Die Dichtung des Lyrikers kann nichts aussagen, was nicht in der ungeheuersten Allgemeinheit und Allgültigkeit bereits in der Musik lag, die ihn zur Bilderrede nötigte. Der Weltsymbolik der Musik ist eben deshalb mit der Sprache auf keine Weise erschöpfend beizukommen. (The poems of the lyrist can express nothing that did not already lie hidden in that vast universality and absoluteness of the music that compelled him to figurative speech. Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music).

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Environmental politics has become inextricably entwined with planetary deep time. This article calls for a reconceptualization of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. It rejects the ontological singularity of the human, either as a biological species (Homo) or as a planetary super-agent (Anthropos) and argues for a perspective centred on companionship and shared vulnerability. Animal philosophy serves here to counter a growing tendency to generalize and address the human species at large, in the singular. The cultural force of the animal, it is suggested, stems from a productive tension between the abstract singular (‘the Animal’) and the unique specificity of each particular nonhuman other. In the context of Anthropocene Studies, references to Anthropos follow a similar logic. The planetary future of humans cannot be deduced from any specific geopolitical context or expressed through universalizing categories. It must be understood, against the vertiginous backdrop of geological time, as a process of becoming: a complex set of material and semiotic practices shaping open-ended, transformative trajectories

This article surveys the growing attention to genre in the works of Wai Chee Dimock, Rosi Braidotti, Lauren Berlant and Rita Felski, among others. I argue that attention to transnational genres, far from valorising global sameness, offers a way to mark cultural difference, relationality and the specific knowledge of nationally and locally embedded traditions. The influx of new voices and visions, I contend, has changed our view of what literature is and does, moving away from the notion of genre as a classificatory system and towards a new idiom centred on affect, flux and creative invention. The constitutive openness of global figurations lies at the root of our current fascination with genre theory, especially in debates about world literature. Relationality and futurity, I suggest, are what makes genre theory especially relevant to the cultural-discursive matrix of planetarity, which is similarly concerned with processes of becoming.In an essay published in 2012, comparatist Mariano Siskind deplores the conspicuous absence of genre categories, both historical and formal, from recent critical debates about world literature. Since the close of the twentieth century, he explains, scholarly attention has focused on global patterns of production, circulation, translation and transcultural appropriation, leaving little room for an organizing concept that seems to imply transhistorical sameness at the expense of geocultural diversity. This lack of engagement with genre, for Siskind, marks a problematic break with century-old traditions of learning and leaves theorists without a ' critical tool capable of realizing the promise of order in a world of textual chaos' (Siskind 2012: 345). World literature, according to this American scholar, has given rise to new imaginaries and generic formations, but critics have not, until now, found ways of articulating the creative potential of these phenomena. Instead, genre tends to remain associated with traditional notions of textuality and reception that are no longer perceived as a useful matrix. Siskind concludes: 'We need a new conception of genre as a contingently bound, heterogeneous discursive constellation that provides world literary readers with a ground for comparison' (354).Siskind's call did not fall on deaf ears. Genre, as I want to show in this article, is in the process of becoming once again a central critical concept in the arts and humanities. This is partly the result of a more general fascination with popular genres. As Theodore Martin has shown, contemporary authors and filmmakers are increasingly drawn to the constraints of recognizable generic traditions, which they explore not in the spirit of postmodern playfulness but in an ' earnest attempt to contribute to the history of a given genre' (Martin 2017: 8).