Call for Papers: Living through Human Trumpery: Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene
Organized by Kate Singer
International Conference on Romanticism, October 20-23, 2016 (abstracts due May 25, 2016) Colorado Springs, Colorado
The Romantic-era arguably ushered in the age of the Anthropocene, an era of human-centric disregard of the natural world, but it may be that notions of the Anthropocene have now granted us a profoundly alternative way to engage with the Romanticism we teach and also to encounter differently what Quentin Meillasoux terms “the great outdoors.” This roundtable offers a space to share new approaches to Romantic texts so often taught to be about the interactions of nature and human subjectivity and, concomitantly, to explore new directions in teaching revolutionary change through theories of the Anthropocene.
Papers might discuss pedagogies considering one of the following questions or other like-minded ones. How can theories of hyperobjects (Morton), quadruple objects (Harman), the arche-fossil (Meillasoux), and other eco-critical approaches help us teach the natural, nonhuman world endemic to Romantic-era texts? How can eco-feminists such as Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz, helps us to reframe both geopolitical and socioeconomic materialities for our students? How do Romantic texts when discussed in the classroom themselves give us new language to speak ethically of the nonhuman world that exists without us, of drawing new relations between human and nonhuman, or of talking productively about climate change and other imminent apocalyptical futures? How can teaching Romantic help us rethink the interlocking problems of gender, sexuality, biopolitics, as well as the bare and animal lives at the margins of the human purview?
Ten-minute presentations might explore a syllabus devoted to the topic, a section of a course, a particular approach to a text, or a particular assignment. Please email 250-word abstracts to Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College, ksinger@mtholyoke.edu) by May 25th.
