SCHEDULE---2013 NOVEL Fall Conference: The Novel and the Anthropocene
Friday, October 18th 2013
Duke University, FHI Garage, 1st Floor, Smith Warehouse, Durham, NC 27708
10:00 – 5:30
“The Anthropocene” is a recently coined, as-of-yet informal geologic period intended to mark the moment when human activities began to have significant global impacts on earth’s ecosystems. This forum proposes to gather three speakers across a range of fields to think about how novelistic form, from the 18th century to the 21st, has enabled a variety of narratives about the relation between the human and the environment in an attempt to contextualize this emerging discourse.
How has our way of thinking about the human-environment relationship changed—what did it mean to think geologically in the moment of Lyell’s Principles of Geology [1830-33]? What does it mean to think geologically in the moment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [1988-present]? The term’s popularizers, Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoemer, date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the geologically very-recent invention of the steam engine in 1784; “the novel” has also been retroactively deemed a geologically recent event, seen as “rising” out of the 18th century. What is it about our narratives of the ‘rise’ of the novel as a literary form the ‘rise’ of the human as a geological force that finds our accounts of these two rises perhaps not-so-coincidentally intertwined? If recent discourse on the Anthropocene sometimes seems to push us to think the human as a species entangled in an ecology (or does it?)—no longer the individual, no longer separated into an assortment of Nation-States—how does that revise the form of the Bildungsroman, traditionally considered as the form of the modern liberal individual assimilated into national culture? How has the novel contributed to the narrative genres and forms that we use to tell the story of the Anthropocene, and how—in turn—does the story of the Anthropocene ask us to reconsider what these narrative genres and forms can (or even should) do? How might we approach the Anthropocene in literary study as a concept both offering new possibilities and as a product of contemporary discourse that merits criticism and scrutiny?
Speakers
Matthew Taylor (UNC, Chapel Hill)
Tobias Boes (Notre Dame)
Noah Heringman (University of Missouri)
Sponsored by NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Duke English Department
Schedule
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10:00-12:00 Introduction and First session
Introduction (15 mins)
First speaker: Matthew Taylor (UNC, Chapel Hill) (20-25 mins)
Paper Title, TBD
1st Graduate Student Respondent, Israel Durham (7 mins)
2nd Graduate Student Respondent, Fran McDonald (7 mins)
Discussion (~60 mins discussion)
12:00-1:30 Break
(Sandwiches and drinks)
1:30-3:15 Second Session
Second speaker: Tobias Boes (Notre Dame) (20-25 mins)
Paper Title, TBD
1st Graduate Student Respondent, Adam Lambert (7 mins)
2nd Graduate Student Respondent, Rebecca Evans (7 mins)
Discussion (~60 mins)
3:30-5:30 Third session
Third speaker: Noah Heringman (University of Missouri) (20-25 mins)
Paper Title, TBD
1st Graduate Student Respondent, Thomas Manganaro (7 mins)
2nd Graduate Student Respondent, Patrick Morgan (7 mins)
Discussion (~60 mins)