Call for Papers: Literature and the Environment

CALL FOR PAPERS: ASSOCIATION FOR THE ASSOCIATION FOR LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT, UK AND IRELAND, BIENNIAL CONFERENCE

‘Green Knowledge’

Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge 2-4^th September 2015

Plenary Speakers

Professor Ursula K. Heise (UCLA)

Richard Mabey

Professor Louise Westling

(University of Oregon)

In The Diversity of Life, E. O. Wilson recalled the experience of recognising his profound ignorance about the object of his research in the forests of the Amazon:

“About the orchids of that places we knew very little. About flies and beetles almost nothing, fungi nothing, most kinds of organisms nothing. Five thousand kinds of bacteria might be found in a pinch of soil, and about them we knew absolutely nothing.”

Wilson’s pinch of Amazonian soil begs the question: how much do we know about the natural world and our relationship with it? Equally, what should we know and how can we know it?

To this end, we invite papers that consider our ways of knowing and unknowing the natural world. Topics to be covered may include (but need not be restricted to):

·         Ways of knowing: scientific, cultural, metaphysical, religious  

·         Science and technology studies and ecocriticism

·         Human/cultural geographies and ecocriticism

·         Histories of the discourses of science and/or environmentalism

·         Emergent ideas in ecocriticism, ecofeminism, new materialism

·         The nature/culture boundary in literary and other discourses

·         Discourses of ecological crisis, including climate change, species extinction, and biodiversity loss

·         Nature Writing: old and new

·         Experimental literature, avant-garde ecopoetics, new directions

·         And to acknowledge our location, Cambridge ecology and natural historians (John Ray, Charles Darwin, Arthur Tansley, and others)

We also welcome papers on any topic addressing environmental themes in literature and other media.

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words for 20-minute presentations to asleuki-2015@admin.cam.ac.uk by 14^th February 2015. Proposals for pre-formed panels and roundtables are welcomed.

Conference updates will be accessible via the ASLE-UKI website: www.asle.org.uk. We may seek to publish a selection of conference proceedings in our journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, published in association with Routledge.