cfp.english.upenn.edu

The rise of the ecologically-oriented approaches to literature and the development of ecocriticism as a scholarly discipline in the 1970s did not remain very long the prerogative of the Anglo-American literature and scholarship. Other national literatures and literary studies have been rapidly developing their views on the connections between literature and ecology; these are oftem based on different premises and follow their own respective literary traditions.

The German ecocritical approach of today is characterized by a number of general theoretical paradigms, such as the system-theoretical approach of Hofer (2007) and the cultural ecology of Zapf (2002, 2008). At the same time, an active revision of the established literary canon is in full swing; it proceeds in two directions: more and more new literary works and their authors are recognized and studied as ecocritical; at the same time, established works and genres, such as nature poetry, and even whole literary movements, such as Romanticism, are approached from the ecocritical perspective.

This panel seeks to understand the dynamics of the recent developments in both modern ecologically-oriented German-language prose and German ecocritical scholarship. We invite abstracts for papers exploring works of modern German-language literature from the ecocritical perspective. The possible topics include, but are not limited to, historical approaches to German ecocriticism, theoretical and methodological approaches (post-colonial studies, feminism, critical theory, cultural ecology, etc.), different aspects of ecocriticism (cultural, economic, political, aesthetical), as well as analyses of modern German-language prose works from the ecocritical perspective.

Abstracts of 300-500 words may be submitted electronically as MS Word or PDF attachments by March 15 to:

Alexander E. Pichugin, pichugin@sas.upenn.edu

Selected papers will be presented at the MLA Convention January 3–6, 2013, in Boston. All submissions will be considered for a proposed anthology.