(CFP: PAMLA 2024) Animal Studies and Literature
The 121th annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA 2024) will be held at the Margaritaville Resort in Palm Springs, California (formerly the Riviera Resort, a favorite hangout of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and other Hollywood and musical stars). We will be opening our conference with a welcome event on Thursday, November 7, and continuing the conference through Sunday, November 10, 2024.
As part of PAMLA 2024, this special session entitled "Animal Studies and Literature: Translation in Action" seeks papers broadly related to the intersection of literature and animal studies, across genres (poetry, fiction, essays, films, etc.) and national literatures, with a special (but not exclusive) interest in proposals that engage with the 2024 PAMLA conference theme: Translation in Action. "Translation in Action" might characterize how humans have strived to translate the mind of nonhuman animals in human terms over the course of history. In premodern times, animals were venerated as symbolic forms of nature; they then became targets of conquest, and later of capture, until the ascendance of animal-standpoint thinking in the twentieth century. Through these eras, literature has functioned as an enterprise to understand nonhuman animals, with whom we share no common language.
As the series preface of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature states, various academic disciplines, including literary studies, can be found in the process of taking an "animal turn," questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by engaging seriously with nonhuman animal presences. This line of inquiry has become increasingly more important today. If phenomena such as the recent pandemic have revealed anything, it is the limits of human-centered thinking: our society exists in a delicate balance with the nonhuman world, where an encroachment into the wild can unleash infectious diseases into the human population and companion animals can offer comfort and healing to people in times of need.
Below are a few sample questions that can potentially be asked in this session; other relevant inquiries will be welcomed. How has literature functioned as an enterprise to imagine and understand nonhuman animals, and bridge the gap left in the absence of shared language? How has the literary imagination contributed to the changes in our perspectives on the responsible and constructive ways of dialoguing with nonhuman animals? As examples such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" and Haruki Murakami's "Abandoning a Cat" suggest, our sense of ethics surrounding the treatment of animals is in some ways transhistorical and in other ways unsettled. How critical have literary representations of animals been in translating their interiority to us, especially if we regard literature as one of the critical components in how people learn moral sentiments? What kind of translatability exists between animal-standpoint criticism and other standpoint theory movements, such as feminism and antiracism? If to rethink the animal were to rethink the human—such as it happens in Margaret Atwood's "February"—what can we learn from our real or imagined conversation with nonhuman animals?
Areas of inquiry may encompass, but are not limited to, the following:
- theories and practices relevant to animal studies and literature: e.g., animal ethics, animal psychology, environmental humanities, cultural studies, law and literature, posthumanism, etc.
- hybridity, pandemic, animal rights, and other topics related to the PAMLA 2024 theme (https://www.pamla.org/conference/2024-conference-theme/)
- translation theories
- empathy studies
- human-animal relationship
- ethics of representation
- moral philosophy and literature
- comparative literature – comparison across time periods, genres, cultures, etc.
More information about the conference can be found at PAMLA's conference website:
https://www.pamla.org/pamla2024/
Paper proposals can be submitted via PAMLA's online system:
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/
From the list of sessions, choose session number 19090, "Animal Studies and Literature: Translation in Action."
The initial abstract proposal deadline is currently set on April 30, 2024.