interdisciplinary

Imaginactivism[i]

A Speculative Fiction Workshop on Environmental Justice, Flourishing and Cohabitation

18 October 2017

Science and Justice Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz

Expressions of interest by: September 20, 2017

Deadline for submissions: October 2, 2017

Call for Conference Paper Proposals, “The Anthropocene and Beyond,” Hong Kong, 31 May-2 June 2018. Human society and culture have arrived at a pivotal moment in the production of scientific, economic, psychological, and even artistic and philosophical subjectivity and identity. The different “scales” inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene galvanize both the local and global, inviting academic research to adopt an interdisciplinary approach with unprecedented pace and intensity. The Anthropocene has emerged as the ultimate conceptual horizon of cultural, economic, and political debates, disrupting the whole pattern of our “thought” itself in a radical process of paradigm shift.

Recent scholarship in literary studies has witnessed a return to an otherwise perennially unfashionable topic: genre. Also the subject of the 2009 English Institute and subsequent volume The Work of Genre (2011), this proliferation of novel theoretical and historical approaches to genre has taken several forms. Whereas scholars like Wai Chee Dimock have worked to disentangle theories of genre from a rigidly synchronic historicism, other critics—for example, Virginia Jackson with lyric and Elaine Freedgood with the realist novel—have sought to foreground genre as fundamentally historical.

The ancient Greek word topos is commonly translated as “place” and referred to a region, site, or geographical position. While the ancient Greek language is long gone, the term topos has survived and passed into the modern vernacular. Today, the word topos is used in literary theory and refers to any common literary theme or motif. This passage of the term for “place” into literary analysis is the natural extension of how the Classics viewed space, as they defined their world through fictions and mythology. The flora and fauna found in the pastoral realm had their origins in various myths, while the city gave the temple a central location and tie its central civic and religious festival to theatre.

Every play imagines its own world—but the worlds they imagine must in some way connect with their audience, both past and present. This panel invites perspectives on early modern English drama that considers the balance between these two poles: the imagined world of the setting and its connection to the surrounding culture in early modern England. This balance is particularly important in early modern English drama for both historical reasons—an increased awareness of other worlds and their different reality within the expanding cultural purview of the early modern English—and literary ones—since so much criticism of these plays has focused on their relation to early modern England itself to the exclusion of their frequently quite disparate settings.