“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, October 14, 2012

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.



1 comment:

Julian G.-P. said...

Does this CFP have an email address and deadline yet? I can't seem to locate it elsewhere online.