Science and Fiction: Democracy, Narrative, and the Natural Sciences
In conjunction with the conference theme of “Going Public: What the MMLA Owes Democracy,” this year’s Science and Literature permanent session invites papers which engage a related theme of “Democracy, Narrative, and the Natural Sciences.” In particular, it invites papers attentive to the scientific discourses moving through fictional texts as they reveal narrative and/or political commitments to democracy, equity, and justice. Submissions might engage but will hopefully not be limited by the following suggestions:
· Agricultural uplift in the works of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois
· Botanical and geographical metaphors for liberation in Black women’s nature poetry
· Climate science and the imagination of environmental justice
· Darwinian evolutionary science and the imagination of socially progressive futures
· Eugenic feminisms from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Gloria Anzaldúa
· Gothic landscapes and lessons from conservation sciences
· Industrial capitalism and its discontents
· Postcolonial ecologies
· Posthumanism and post-apocalyptic narrative
· Radical geography and narrative representations of space and time
· Space travel and the perceptive capacities of the alien body in sf
· Transgender studies and the gender-expansive narratives of Samuel R. Delany and others
Please submit a brief abstract or proposal (roughly 300 words) and bio (roughly 100 words) via email to andy.harper@slu.edu by 1 June 2023.