WS: Erin James: Ecocriticism and Narrative Form

Please register for this event by sending an email to Liza.Bauer@gcsc.uni-giessen.de or Hannah.Klaubert@gcsc.uni-giessen.de .

Kindly note that this event takes place on Monday, 9th Dec, 1 - 6 pm and Tuesday, 10th Dec,
9 am - 6 pm.

While ecocriticism has traditionally focused on thematic literary analysis, a growing number of scholars working in the field today examine the role of narrative form in literature’s exploration of our environments (James and Morel 2018). In reaction to a growing, methodologically diverse ecocritical scholarship, calls for a refocusing on the “aesthetic” dimensions of environmental literature (cf. Roos, Hunt, and Tallmadge 2010, Heise 2010) and, more precisely, the “cross-fertilization” of ecocritical and narratological scholarship (Lehtimäki 2013, James and Morel 2018, Neumann 2019, Rupp 2019) are becoming louder.

 
In this workshop, we encourage PhD students and Postdocs working in Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities to specifically consider the formal and narratological dimension of their research and to exchange insights into the gains and limits of importing narratological scholarship into ecocritical inquiry (and vice versa). We invite contributions dealing with the following topics (and beyond):
 
- Econarratology
- Anthropocene narratives
- Non-human narrators / characters
- Representations of slow violence through climate change, (radio)toxicity, extinction
- Narratives of non-human minds and trans-species cognition
- The fictionality of environmental facts, the factuality of narrative environments
- Speculation, weird ecologies, uncanny natures
- Trans-media, trans-locality, trans-species narratology
- Empirical Ecocriticism
- Ecocriticism and film analysis
- Stasis, description, slowness in environmental writing
- Scale, planetarity, focalization in eco-narratives
- Environment and storyworld
 
The workshop sessions will be complemented by a Masterclass and a Keynote Lecture by Prof. Erin James (University of Idaho) on her current book project “Narrative in the Anthropocene”.
 

// Prof. Erin James (University of Idaho)