Critical conversations concerned with ecosystems often relate to various geos (-logies, -graphies, etc.), the anthropocene, and the techno-industrial. Yet, as Elizabeth Povinelli astutely questions, “[have] we become so entranced by the image of power working through life [namely biopolitics and its variations] that we haven’t noticed the new problems, figures, strategies and concepts emerging all around us…?” (4). The fluidity of ‘systems’ - whether they be ecological, political, social, etc. – has become a central concern for a wide range of hitherto disconnected fields, and has inaugurated critical conversations about the role of silenced, unspoken, or undertheorized narratives that defy conventional understandings of space, history, and culture.(Eco)systems are consequently understood as metaphysical constructs that bring to light topics that inherently seek to escape confinement and definition, such as the individual’s relation to a variously-defined environment, literature, trauma, anxiety, etc.This conference hopes to intervenein an era marked by both awareness and incomprehensionof howbodies, literatures, and theories expose and redress – to the extent that it is possible or desired - what Cornelius Castoriadis referred to as“infrastructures of uncertainty” (1987).The organizers invite scholars to think about how literature and other cultural productions address the nature of various incomplete systems - the planetary, ecology, memory, history - and investigate the widening gaps legible in our contemporary discourse around these issues. Our task, now more than ever, is, as Nick Srnicek suggests, to find functional concepts “whereby [an] event is investigated and its findings integrated into a new situation. With that project incomplete, [...] the advent of a non-philosophical subject can only constitute the necessary, but not yet sufficient, conditions for constructing new empirico-transcendental spaces incommensurable with the [contemporary] socius.”

Our hybrid conference (March 3-5, 2023) seeks to lay bare the incompleteness of the various social, ecological, political, geological, literary, pedagogical, etc. systems that we engage in, with, and alongside.We aim to highlight how, in a variety of cultural and theoretical imaginaries,the worlds around us are (perhaps contradictorily) coalescing to form new systems of infinite possibilities,endless drafts, narrative divergences and impediment, systemic failures, and the creative impasse. To that end,we invite students to explore literary and cultural works that reflect upon the following questions:How is agap theorized? What are the unexplored ways in which systems emerge in and among the silences of literature, and how does this contribute to our understanding of a (meta)physical existence?How do literature and culture become what Ian Baucom refers to as “staging grounds for [...] enduring, and still incomplete politics of freedom; emblematic places of the contending forces and force fields of the modern?” How can narratives involving imagined divisions inform ontological questions about being and becoming?Finally, what does it mean to interact with the environment via operations where reality becomes (ironically?) concretely abstract?

The English Graduate Students’ Society (EGSS) at the Université de Montréal invites graduate students working in English or French on the notion of ‘incomplete systems’ from various disciplinary perspectives to submit papers or creative writing for presentation at our annual graduate conference. Papers can consider a multitude of topics, ranging from bodies, the environment, phenomenology, gender politics, (dis)location, sensory experiences, and processes of othering, to specific historical periods, themes, and genres such as the Victorian era, environmental writing, fictional depictions of space, modernist fragmentation, procedural/experimental writing, etc. The EGSS also encourages undergraduate students to submit proposals to participate in the conference, as an undergraduate panel will be organized for accepted applications. 

Submissions can come from a range of disciplines including: supernatural studies, pop-culture studies, speculative fiction, sci-fi, realism, surrealism, poetics, period studies, disability studies, gender studies, ethnic and indigenous studies, non-canonical genres (graphic novels, fanfiction, etc.), queer studies, literary and cultural theory, digital humanities, film and visual arts, as well as other disciplines relevant to the fields.

We ask that those interested in delivering 15 to 20-minute presentations submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by January 15, 2023. Please submit your application through the survey at the following link: https://forms.gle/18f7ZubfXHWHuCE39. For any queries, please feel free to email the organization committee at egss.conferences@gmail.com for more information.