Call for Papers – “Literature and the Environment” University of Graz,Austria

Call for Papers – “Literature and the Environment”

International Conference to be held at the University of Graz, Austria, 8-10 June 2017

The aim of this conference is to underline the specific relevance of literature and of literary studies for environmental and ecological concerns. As literature has addressed environmental issues in the past decades, and eco-literature has evolved into a distinctive new genre, eco- criticism has emerged as a concomitant branch of literary studies. However, there still seems to be a tendency within literary criticism to regard eco-literature as a form of littérature engagée which is rather less satisfactory from an aesthetic point of view. This view has often led to an almost exclusive focus on contents in critical approaches to committed environmental literature. However, and as suggested by Hubert Zapf’s model of literature as an element of a cultural ecology, it is the specificity of literary texts which determines, to a large extent, their unique cultural function. Thus, literature unfolds its main potential with regard to cultural transformations not only on a thematic or referential level, but also as an effect of “the specific structures and functions of literary textuality as it has evolved in relation to and competition with other forms of textuality in the course of cultural evolution.” (Zapf 2006)

The conference thus aims at exploring the potential of literary texts as cultural manifestations which either operate apart from or undermine pragmatic, one-dimensional and conventionalized discourses of ‘innovation’ and ‘development’. We invite papers which discuss individual works or genres with a view to the textual strategies they employ in order to position themselves within the larger system of discourses that define our relationship with the environment.

Papers may want to address the following:

• Literary renderings of environmental crisis
• Poetic/dramatic/narrative strategies for mediating environmental issues
• Human/non-human agency in literary texts
• Constructing and envisioning animals and animal perspectives
• Intertextuality, parody etc. as counter-discursive strategies
• Negotiating the pragmatic and the aesthetic in environmental literature
• Genre and the question of environmental issues

Length of paper presentations: 20 minutes

Proposals: Please send your proposal (ca. 250 words) to the following email addresss: [email protected]