ecocriticism and environmental studies

CFP: NeMLA (ASLE Session): Race, Class, and Environment in 19th- and Early-20th-Century Literature (deadline 9/30/18; conference 3/21-24/19)

50th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 21-24, 2019

Washington, DC

Race, Class, and Environment in 19th- and Early-20th-Century Literature (ASLE Session)

Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)

Leslie Fiedler describes American fiction as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction… a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (Love and Death in the American Novel, 29). However, for settlers within the early colonies and citizens of the young republic, the wilderness of the supposed New World not only represented material promise, but also unknown danger. This panel proposes a move away from the more common “land of light and affirmation” reading of American nature towards an ecogothic approach.

This panel proposes to bring together scholars whose work combines ecocriticism and cognitivist approaches to literature for the purpose of considering the potential of the ongoing dialogue between these two fields. Ecocriticism typically looks at how environment is represented and how humans can create an optimal relationship with the non-human world. Cognitive science is generally interested in how humans represent concepts to ourselves and how we make meaning out of those concepts. An understanding of the mind is essential to an understanding of humankind’s relationship to and perception of the non-human environment.

DEADLINE EXTENDED! 8/25/2018

The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts will host a panel at the Thirteenth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, June 26-30 2019 at the University of California Davis ( https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/ ). 

Papers on any of the following topics are welcome:

(future) science and alternative futures 

neurobiology and ecological crisis

multispecies communities in the Annthropocene: cross-cultural currents and global vectors

science and the politics of the Anthropocene

sciences of extinction and/or survival

Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy Inaugural Issue, 'The End Times'

The apocalypse is disappointing.
—Maurice Blanchot, 1964

Another end of the world is possible.
—Anonymous graffiti, 2016