Ecocriticism and Narrative CFP

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) 2013 CFP: Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory

University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
May 28 - June 1, 2013

This panel welcomes proposals on any topic that explores possible points of dialogue between ecocriticism and narrative theory. Despite the fact that both of these approaches to the study of literature and culture are well established, they appear to have said little to one another; Narrative, the flagship journal of narrative theory, has never featured a special issue focusing on the environment in narratives, and ISLE, the flagship journal of ecocriticism, has never featured a special issue exploring the role that narrative structures play in representations of the environment.

But if these conversations have not yet occurred, it is not because the two approaches lack overlapping interests. On the contrary, opportunities for cross-pollination abound. The vocabulary developed by narratologists could benefit certain ecocritical studies, especially in helping ecocritical scholars better account for the formal aspects of representations of environment in various types of narratives (novels, short stories, films, etc). Ecocritical insights could help to broaden narrative theory, particularly in strengthening the connection between text and extratextual world of interest to many postclassical narratologists and expanding the repertoire of questions narrative theorists ask of narratives. This panel seeks to explore both directions of this developing conversation. Possible topics include:

-Access to nature alongside/versus access to narrative

-Animals as characters

-Chronotopes

-Gendered approaches to narrating natural experience

-Mimesis and diegesis

-Narration, expectation, and natural experience

-Narrative and/as environmental rhetoric

-Narrative and ecocentrism

-Narrative and/of space or place

-Narrative as mediator of natural events (journalism, nature, and narrative)

-“Natural” and “Unnatural” narrative

-Natural disaster as plot device, deus ex machina

-Person and narration (first, third; omniscient, restricted) and nonhuman narrators

-Role of nature in indigenous forms of narrative

-Narrative storyworlds as virtual environments

Send 300 word abstracts to Erin James at ejames@uidaho.edu by Friday, October 26th, 2012. 
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Erin James
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Dr. MS 1102
Moscow, ID 83844-1102
ejames@uidaho.edu
(208) 885-6124