1. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF
LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT (EASLCE)
"Environmental Change - Cultural Change"
University of Bath, 1-4 September, 2010
Call for Papers
Contributions are invited for an international conference on 'Environmental Change - Cultural Change'. The event is organised on behalf of EASLCE and ASLE-UK, the European and British affiliates of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and supported by the University of Bath's Institute for Sustainable Energy and Environment (I-SEE), the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages.
Attention will focus on two aspects of the relationship between environmental change and cultural change:
- the cultural, social and historical framing of environmental communication, and in particular of discourses of climate change and loss of biodiversity
- the challenge to contemporary environmental literature and film, and their potential contribution to ecological education and consciousness.
Public understandings of and attitudes towards global warming and other environment-related issues including GM foods, nuclear power and wilderness preservation vary in sometimes surprising ways from one country to the next. They also change over time. Apocalypticism, the environmentalist master narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, has given way, as Frederick Buell has written, to acceptance of environmental crisis as a way of life. We have learned to live with a multitude of daily ecological risk scenarios, preventing, mitigating or simply accommodating ourselves to them. The assumption that sustainability demands cultural change has been challenged by powerful resistance to radical lifestyle change: in practice, environmental problems have tended instead to be subjected to progressive reframings. Key questions for the conference will be how historical experience, physical circumstances and imaginative construction combine in the cultural framing of individual issues, how norms and expectations change, what cultural understandings of 'nature' and the human subject have stood or still stand in the way of constructive engagement with environmental change, what alternatives the reservoir of contemporary and historical images and narratives of nature and culture has to offer, and what rhetorics and art forms might be adopted as strategies in facing environmental change today. The conference will seek to gain new insights into the potential role of environmental literature, film and other media in generating environmental knowledge (Peter Swirski).
Provisional acceptance has been received from the following invited speakers:
Prof Sidney Dobrin (University of Florida, Dept of English; a specialist in ecocomposition)
Dr Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham, Dept of Geography; a leading researcher in the historical conceptualisation of climate change, social responses and adaptation)
Dr Robert Macfarlane (University of Cambridge, Dept of English; critic and nature writer, author of Mountains of the Mind)
Dr Timo Maran (University of Tartu, Institute of Semiotics; a leading writer on biosemiotics and Estonian nature writing)
Prof Robert Watson (UCLA, Dept of English; author of The Green and the Real in Early Modern Literature)
Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 3000 words/20 minutes OR contributions to paper jam sessions 1200 words/12 minutes) and panels (3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are invited. Topics will include but not be restricted to:
- literary and filmic representations of environmental change in different cultures/ media/ historical periods, and comparisons between them
- myths, lead metaphors and rhetorical tropes in historical conceptualisations of environmental change, and their role in contemporary media communication or political/ popular scientific discourse on the environment
- theoretical approaches, especially posthumanism/ postsubjectivism and biosemiotics
- the aesthetics of cultural responses to climate change: genres (especially varieties of Nature Writing), narrative strategies, images
- environmental citizenship
- environmental activism between modernisation and resistance to modernisation
- cognitive, emotional and cultural drivers of environmental behaviour, and materialist and aesthetic, secular and religious motivations
- the global and the local in theorisations and representations of environmental change
- the contribution of environmental literature, film and art to environmental literacy
- practical demonstrations of ecocritical pedagogy
The lingua franca of the conference will be English, but (following practice at previous EASLCE conferences) proposals for panels in other languages are welcome. Individual papers in languages other than English will be considered if they can be grouped together in panels. Accommodation has been reserved on the University of Bath's attractive campus, which is about a mile from the centre of Bath, a World Heritage City with Roman Baths and famous Georgian crescents. A half day excursion is included in the conference schedule, and there will be a further optional field trip on the Sunday after the conference. Further details including conference costs will be announced via the conference website <http://www.bath.ac.uk/esml/conferences/e-c-c-c/> in Spring 2010. Funding is currently being sought for bursaries to support postgraduate/ unwaged attendance.
Please submit proposals for papers (title plus 250 words) to Professor Axel Goodbody e-mail: A.H.Goodbody@bath.ac.uk and Dr Greg Garrard e-mail: g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk by 1 February, 2010, indicating your IT requirements
2. Second EASLCE conference (report)
EASLCE’s second biennial conference took place in Klagenfurt from April 28 to May 1, 2006. The theme was ‘Water: Literary, Cultural and Environmental Perspectives’. The conference, which was organised by Maureen Devine, with the support of the Department of English and American Studies at the Alps-Adriatic University of Klagenfurt, was a lively and interesting gathering. There were 5 plenary speakers. The environmental sociologist Thomas Kluge (Institute for Social-Ecological Development, Frankfurt) opened the conference by speaking (in German) on attitudes towards water in historical perspective, and the continuing challenges posed by the need to meet the clean and waste water needs of cities. Vera Norwood (University of New Mexico) gave a thought-provoking lecture on fictional accounts of hurricanes and their consequences by 20th-century American women writers, exploring the gender dimension of so-called ‘natural’ catastrophes. The British novelist Maggie Gee and the Dublin poet Rosemarie Rowley read from their work, and Brian Clarke, fishing correspondent and environmental columnist for The Times, spoke about and read from his acclaimed novel The Stream.
The conference was attended by over 70 delegates, who came mainly from Europe, but also from the USA, Canada, Australia, India, Japan and South Africa. It was good to see news of EASLCE spreading beyond the previous ‘core’ countries Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain to Spain and Italy, France and Belgium. The Eastern European countries were also better represented at this conference than two years ago in Münster, with delegates from Russia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Greece and Turkey, as well as Estonia and Lithuania. The papers in the workshops addressed a wide range of themes related to the cultural, social, political and environmental significance of water, with literature (from a range of countries as well as the USA) playing a prominent part. Among the most enjoyable aspects of the conference were a magical performance of music on the glass harp, and the Slovenian Andrej Zdravic’s fascinating eco-documentary filmRiverglass.
EASLCE would like to express its thanks to Maureen for all the hard work she put into hosting this conference, and to all our sponsors, especially the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Klagenfurt, the US Embassy in Vienna and the British Council, and, last but not least, ASLE, who generously enabled travel subsidies to be granted to a number of delegates.
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