[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Ecocriticism and The Animal Other (9/15/06; NEMLA, 3/1/06-3/4/06)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

CFP: Ecocriticism and The Animal Other (09/15/06; NEMLA, 03/01/06-03/04/06)

Theorist Cary Wolfe claims the question of the animal is "perhaps the
central problematic for contemporary culture and theory." This panel
seeks papers that address the presence of the animal in literary,
filmic, and other cultural forms. Proposals energized by
interdisciplinary and cultural studies methodologies are especially
welcome. Also welcome are proposals that use the location of the animal
to theorize new modes of ecocritical practice.

This session responds to a groundswell in contemporary theoretical and
ecocritical practice in which scholars have increasingly begun to attend
to the presence and function of the animal in literature, film, art, and
philosophy. Recent work by Donna Haraway, The Companion Species
Manifesto; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal; Jacques Derrida,
"And Say the Animal Responded"; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American
Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory and the
anthology Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal; taken together with
recent films such as March of the Penguins, Eight Below, Winged
Migration, and Grizzly Man, indicate that representing and thinking
about the animal occurs at all levels of culture.  As Derrida and
Haraway remind us, opening up the question of the animal simultaneously
opens up the question of the human. That is, by interrogating the
particular ways in which the status of animal is assigned to an "other,"
one creates the opportunity to investigate the operations of long
humanist traditions that employ the construction of the animal to shore
up the construction of the human.

The purpose of this session is to convene scholars whose work comes at
the question of the animal from a variety of directions, thereby
creating productive discussion that cuts across genre and discipline.
In the service of examining representations of the animal in literature,
film, and other cultural forms, topics might include: posthumanist
perspectives on or theorizations of the animal, animals and
technologies, the animal in/as art, animals and globalization, animality
as inequality/animality and other inequalities, the companion animal.

This panel is co-sponsored by the Association of the Study of Literature
and the Environment.

Proposals should be 500-750 words.  Send proposal by email to:
nmerola at risd.edu.  Deadline: Sept 15, 2006.


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