Reading and Writing the World: Perception and Identity in the Era of Climate Change
An International Conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone)
in collaboration with CECILLE (Centre d’Etudes en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères)
5-6 April 2019
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France — Site Saint Charles
Keynote speakers:
Thomas Dutoit, Université de Lille 3, France (confirmed)
Sarah Wood, University of Kent, UK (to be confirmed)
Convened by doctoral students: Laura Lainvae (EMMA) Sarah Jonckheere (CECILLE)
The current climate crisis is an ongoing chaotic disturbance that defies teleology, mastery, and control. For the first time in human and planetary history, a species has made an impact so profound and traumatic upon its environment that it has rewritten the earth.The Anthropocene as a scene of eruptions and fractures, of shifting grounds and shaking structures, of de-centeringand opening, could, as such, be read as solicitation to set in motion a change in identity: in order to find solutions, our thinking about Earth as well as about our place in it should change. “Politics in the wake of the ecological thought must begin with the Copernican ‘humiliations’ – coming closer to the actual dirt beneath out feet, the actuality of Earth”, Timothy Morton suggests, evoking a shift in perception and hierarchy. Such shifts could be investigated through modernist and postmodernist literary grounds, through various modes of writing that challenge our anthropocentric modes of thinking, decentralizing man, and wondering about the agenda and authority of other beings. As Thomas Dutoit writes about Alice Munro: “Munro’s favourite is the ‘kame, or kame moraine,’ the description of which, in earthly and cartographical shapes, stresses the fact that if ‘geography’ (earth-writing or writing-earth) is the attempt, by man, to write, to describe, to map, the earth, ‘geography,’ by the inverse genitive, is also the earth’s writing, the traces that the earth itself inscribes. This ‘geo-grapher’ — the earth — is a never-stopping arranger, in degree more an earth-writer, a géo-littéraire,than even Alice Munro, even if, in kind, they are molecularly the same.”
This conference will attempt to trace and analyze modes of reading and writing that are not based on human mastery and exceptionalism, but rather make room for different possible viewpoints, while also … read more