CALL FOR PAPERS: Ecocritical Topics for the 21st Century and the Centuries to Come
Guest editor: José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Submissions until September 1, 2023
Thinking about the literature of the 21st century is to think about the literature of the centuries to come, not only because the ecological crisis that is a crucial issue of the present day has been preparing its actual emergence since the Industrial Revolution accelerated the course of history in the 19th century, but also because it has planned its vigilance in the future by making neoliberal ideology the global paradigm of academic research, economic development, social welfare, and individual fulfilment.
In such an anthropocenic context, the fraudulent pedagogy of dystopias; the sustainability of digital poetry; the literary projection of post-carbon societies and other possible worlds; creative writing as eco-political activism; technology and the narrative of the post-human; biosemiotics and lyricism; literature and the language of plants; the myth of human exceptionalism and animal ethics; Enlightenment, anthropocentrism and ecofeminism; eco-poetics and literary theory; the literature of waste; the disappearance of the Romantic sublime; the beauty and intelligibility of texts; are all eco-critical themes of great relevance for the 21st century and the centuries to come.
Case studies are not so welcome as those bringing multiple cases to illustrate the above and related general themes of theoretical and critical interest. Since nothing comes from nothingness, articles exploring the literary tradition in search of authors and works that build a genealogy of ecological relevance for millennia to come are strongly encouraged. The line against human hubris that connects the literature of Plutarch, Cervantes, Montaigne, Wordsworth, Feijoo, Francisco González Díaz, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Enrique González Martínez, Aldous Huxley and Coetzee does not end in the present but supports the literature of the future, for the literature of the future to be committed to the environment needs to find deep roots in the past. And since collaboration is a value that defies the omnipresent competition, transatlantic relations between Western literary expressions akin to alternative thinking such as those of the Slow Food and De-Growth movements and the literatures of the ancestral peoples of the Americas that serve as cultural vehicles for Amazonian cosmogonies, Mapuche traditions and Andean sumak kawsay are also welcome.
References
Albelda, José, José Mª Parreño y J. M. Marrero Henríquez (eds.). Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el Siglo de la Gran Prueba. Madrid: Catarata, 2018.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Ecologies. Compexity and Process after Deleuze. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
Carretero-González, Margarita (ed.). Spanish Thinking about Animals. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2020.
DeVriess, Scott M. Creature Discomfort: Fauna-criticism, Ethics, and the Representation of Animals in Spanish American Fiction and Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Han Byung-Chul. La sociedad paliativa. Madrid: Herder, 2021.
Hird, Myra J. A Public Sociology of Waste. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
Hitt, Christopher. “Toward and Ecological Sublime”. New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 603-623.
Maran, Timo. Ecosemiotics. The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Marrero Henríquez, José Manuel. (ed.) Hispanic Ecocriticism. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019.
____. “Filología verde y poética de la respiración para un mundo contaminado”. Actio Nova: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada 5 (2021): 417-435.
Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Prádanos, Luis I. and Mark Anderson (eds.). “South Atlantic Ecocriticism”. Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 8.1 (2017).
Puleo, Alicia. La Ilustración olvidada. La polémica de los sexos en el siglo XVIII. Madrid: Anthropos, 2011.
Sessions, George (ed.). Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boston: Shambhala, 1995
Wright, Laura (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Subercaseaux, Bernardo. “Perros y literatura: condición humana y condición animal”. Atenea 509 (2014): 33-62.
