Science and Fiction: Un/natural Selection and Post/human Futures
A Permanent Section of the MMLA

49th Annual M/MLA Convention
November 8-11, 2007
The Renaissance Cleveland Hotel
Cleveland, Ohio

This panel focuses upon the implications of scientific and economic
paradigms for the study of literature and culture. Which principles
from science or economics best account for artistic and political
innovations? How is it that certain ideas, such as the free market,
become "naturalized," and how does this process impact the critiques
launched by its opponents? How does the survival of the fittest,
which is taken as a universal law within capitalism, affect the
conduct of intellectual life in the academy? Is academic rigor
ultimately Darwinian in being exclusionary? Did New Critical memes
end up becoming vanquished by post-structuralist memes? If so, what
new theoretical or methodological memes might be waiting on the
horizon? If nature is a constructed category, what are the laws or
principles that constrain or govern the construction of nature,
whether in the mapping of virtual worlds, the ecology of computer
viruses, or genetic engineering?

We welcome presentations on such topics as

* states of nature reconsidered (Hobbes, Rousseau, Lao-Tse)
* Darwinism, memes, and literary/cultural criticism
* cultural capital and the survival of the fittest
* speculating about theory: intellectual trends seen through the futures market
* the revolutionary aesthetics of world creation (Alexandre Kojève,
Boris Groys on socialist realism, Plato, etc.)
* representations of posthuman bio-technologies (Margaret Atwood,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Michel Houellebecq,
China Miéville, Hideaki Anno, etc.)
* realism in the posthuman era
* science as fundamentalism
* modernity as demonology
* consumerism as cannibalism
* Lust and Unlust: designing artificial worlds beyond the pleasure principle
* theories of emergence and complexity
* climate change, peak oil, and the end(s) of progress

Please send 1-page proposals to Peter Y. Paik (pypaik_at_uwm.edu) by April 16.

Peter Y. Paik
Assistant Professor
French, Italian and Comparative Literature
University of Wisconsin
Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413

--Peter Y. PaikAssistant ProfessorFrench, Italian and Comparative LiteratureUniversity of WisconsinBox 413Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413Tel. 414-229-6299Fax 414-229-2939 ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Sat Feb 24 2007 - 13:12:53 EST