Humanity's footprint: Reading Rings of Saturn and Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene era

Through readings of two "walking memoirs" - W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks - this article considers the implications of the geological concept of the Anthropocene era for the field of life writing studies and its understanding of the human. It considers the ways these and other authors imagine the human, and the costs of the human pursuit of freedom for other species and things, from a planetary perspective.