Nonhumans at Virginia CFP

The University of Virginia English Graduate Conference 2013

Subject to Change: Nature, Text, and the Limits of the Human

We invite you to join us as we explore the ontological, environmental, ethical, and literary implications of living in a world in which the primacy of the human has been called into question.

What does it mean to read an object once we, too, are objects? Do inanimate subjects have a claim to the agency that humans have usually taken to be theirs alone? How are artists and scholars supposed to see into the life of things: the animal, the synthetic, the digital, the inert, the abject? How do we read after nature, in our world of things?

Keynote Speech by: Timothy Morton

Panel Discussion with: Timothy Morton, Jennifer Wicke, Bruce Holsinger, and John Parker; moderated by Rita Felski

Subjects (or is it objects?) of interest include, but are not limited to:

-Object-oriented ontology and the "democracy of objects"
-Whither the "human"?
-The anthropocene and anthropocentrism
-Words for things/things for words
-Nature and the unnatural
-The voice of nature in the conversation of mankind
-Environment and catastrophe
-Dark ecology
-Posthumanism
-Translation and metaphor
-Animism and a living world
-Inhuman Humanities
-Systems and ecosystems, digital and analog, network and wetwork
-Ethics and bioethics in a posthuman world
-New ecology and community
-The limits of the body
-Animalism
-Monstrosity
-Conceptual art and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
-Natural supernaturalism
-Goethean science

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University. He is the author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (forthcoming), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (forthcoming), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), seven other books and eighty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music.