Ethics and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Writing the Environment

ACCUTE Conference Panel, Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences

27-30 May 2017, Ryerson University, Toronto Ontario

“She can’t pretend to be an invisible translator of another way of life, a recording angel hovering somewhere above the scene. Touching the skin of an unfamiliar city, she knows she has become a part of what she touches, but she may never know exactly how . . . [S]he knows that her words can only be a transcription of an elusive, endlessly recurring moment of first contact. In her swift passage through a new world she moves like a bullet. A small violence. Her writing a record of damage” (184).

—   Thomas Wharton, Icefields, 1995 

In the past decade, amidst the affective, sensory, and ethical turns in critical theory, in which scholars and critics have come to increasingly analyze their own embodied positions in relation to their fields of study, there has also been a growing preoccupation with climate change and a shift in human interaction with the precarious ecologies of the global environment. The environment now has several valences, not just the environment in an ecocritical sense but also environments in terms of a spatial ethics and politics.

This panel seeks to interrogate how literary narratives help us as critics to come to grips with and develop new methodologies for analyzing the environment/environments? It asks: what happens when metaphor is not enough? What happens when material, sensory, and affective experiences of the environment exceed human metaphor?

We welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• The boundaries or limitations of an anthropocentric critical framework
• Critical self-location when writing on environment(s)
• New modes of engaging with human-centered questions of environment(s)
• Imagining ethical interactions with environment(s)

Please send a 300-500 word proposal (without personal identifying marks) for a 20 minute paper, as well as a file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement, to nicole.birch.bayley@mail.utoronto.ca and olivia.pellegrino@mail.utoronto.ca by November 1st 2016.