The Environment and the Energy Humanities

Seeking presenters for a panel proposal for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Conference in Detroit, MI, June 20-24, 2017

For a long time, the production and consumption of energy has been a blind spot in literary criticism, but that has recently changed with what has come to be called “the energy humanities.”  Such studies have sought to uncover the effects of energy use—especially that of fossil fuels—on modern systems of thought and to account for the ways in which texts have imagined the exploitation of high-energy resources, often by either valorizing specifically high-energy ways of life or helping to naturalize the practices by repressing the environmental destruction and social injustice upon which such networks depend.  This panel will seek to engage with topics central to the energy humanities in ASLE 2017’s most appropriate setting of Detroit.  Topics of papers may include, but are not limited to,

Modern mobilities, geographies, and energy pathways

Visions of energy use and/or the invisibility, or repression, of energy costs

Landscapes of extraction and life in the “Sacrifice Zones”

Alternative narratives of energy and alternative energy

Energy use and the Anthropocene

Accounts of crash and collapse; post-apocalyptic dystopias and post-industrial fiction and film

Technological fundamentalism and cornucopianism

Energy use before and after oil

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a brief bio, to matthew.pangborn@briarcliff.edu by November 1, 2016.  Paper presentations should be a maximum of 15 minutes long.