Green Words / Green Worlds:
Environmental Literatures and Politics in Canada
A public forum, conference, and workshops sponsored by the Sustainable Writing Laboratory York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies Oct. 21-23, 2011 Gladstone Hotel, Toronto
"It has to be celebrated.
O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it.
. . .
we must draw it and paint it
our pencils and brushes and loving caresses smoothing the holy surfaces."
- P.K. Page
In an interview with Geoff Hancock in 1968, Margaret Atwood forges an explicit connection among aesthetic value, environmental ethics, and the socio-political responsibility of the artist in modern times: "If you see something done very, very well," she argues, ". . . you can feel for two or three minutes that the clouds have parted and you've had a vision of something of what music or art or writing can do, at its best. A revelation of the full range of our human response to the world - that is, what it means to be human, on earth. That seems to be what 'hope' is about in relation to art. Nothing so simple as 'happy endings.'"
The relations among aesthetic judgment, literature, and public life have been long debated by political philosophers (e.g., Nussbaum, Arendt, Derrida) and enacted by writers from a range of political locations. This conference proceeds from the conviction that, in the context of ecological imperilment, literature assumes the role of an imaginary commons within and through which we might reflect on the "facts" of environmental science and policy in such a way as to make them meaningful to our lives, experiences, and desires (and vice versa). Environmental literatures engage the world differently than do environmental policies; ecopoetry embodies and inspires different modes of action. What then, we ask, does this reflection and action add to environmental politics in Canada? How might ecocritical scholars make a stronger case for the involvement of literature in environmental activism and, conversely, how might we make activist involvements more fully part of our scholarly and creative practices?
Moving away from some U.S. ecocritical traditions that argue for the primary mimetic value of literary representation in the elucidation of ecological insights, Don McKay argues that we, as writers and readers, have much to learn from the insufficiencies of language in its attempt to enact the "primordial grasp" of representation: "Poets are supremely interested in what language can't do; in order to gesture outside, they use language in a way that flirts with its destruction" (Vis à Vis 32). More recently, Timothy Morton has argued that nature is itself a problematic construct (a claim that beggars the mimetic ideal); he challenges us instead to "politicize the [environmental] aesthetic"
(Ecology Without Nature 205). Both McKay and Morton, then, propose that poetic and aesthetic relations are a unique realm in which environmental politics might be rethought and reformed: how does art, here, inspire action in new and creative ways?
From a different point in the scholarly/political spectrum, recent
environmental justice-focused ecocritical scholarship has paid special attention to the role of fiction, theatre and poetry in the generation of alternative understandings of the relations among politics, aesthetics and environments (e.g., Adamson, Evans and Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader). How, for example, do indigenous peoples' struggles over the materiality and meaning of land suggest different kinds of environmental stories to underpin an ecological public culture? How can a regional or national ecopolitics benefit from closer attention to diasporic literatures, to wrenching and complex stories of the interpenetration of places in biography and imagination? How are ecological literatures and politics jointly embedded in globalizing relations of race, gender, class, colonialism, sexuality and ability?
We invite creative, academic, and hybrid proposals that consider what politicizing the environmental aesthetic might mean in the context of public culture, politics, and the environmental imagination by Canadian writers and scholars and / or on the subject of Canadian literatures. Topics to be considered might include but are not limited to:
. How might we imagine Canadian writers, scholars, and activists in dialogue as co-creators of a public culture about environmental literature and politics?
. What kinds of knowledge and understanding of environmental issues do fiction, theatre, and poetry inspire as distinct from other forms of environmental discourse?
. How do diverse Canadian literary traditions and texts respond to the intersections of environmental politics with issues of social justice and political representation?
. In what ways does the spectre of environmental holocaust prompt us to reconsider Theodor Adorno's famous pronouncement that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz?
. Is there a tradition of Canadian environmental literature? To what extent is the history of environmentalism in Canada a literary history? To borrow from David Mazel, is there a "Canadian literary environmentalism"?
. How do indigenous, regional, diasporic, ethnic, feminist, queer and other
(often) overtly politicized literary traditions offer insight into the potential for a politicized ecocriticism and environmental literature in Canada (or vice versa)?
. How does Canada's specificity as a settler, colonial nation shape both our literary and our political responses to environmental issues?
. What forms might environmental literature in Canada be said to assume in contemporary practice, and how might these forms contribute to an understanding of the ways in which Canadian public cultures differ from public cultures elsewhere?
. What are the politics of writing the more-than-human Other?
. How might we reprise Robert Frost's question, "What to make of a diminished thing?" in order to address both environmental crisis and the crisis in the humanities?
. What is the role of the writer, reader, and/or critic in our time and in an era of such widespread ecological imperilment?
. How are writing, reading, and/or literary criticism forms of political praxis of the order of stewardship, advocacy, protest, or other overtly environmentalist acts?
. What is the role of literature in a teaching practice that aims to engage with an environmentally political praxis?
. In what ways might literary texts, as environmental interventions in their own right, be said to contribute to an environmental public life? How is literature implicated in ethical and/or engaged citizenry?
. How might literature be a robust form of hope, and what is the potential of hope in present environmental discourse?
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, although all participants are invited to include and experiment with alternative forms of presentation.
Image-intensive presentations are welcome; except in such cases, Power Point is strongly discouraged. All participants will be invited to participate in hands-on writing workshops in addition to scholarly discussions. Green Words / Green Worlds will be a relatively small, intimate gathering; paper proposals will be vetted in terms of both quality and relevance. We are also exploring avenues for eventual publication.
Plenary speakers will include Di Brandt, Armand Garnett Ruffo and Rita Wong.
Please submit a 150-word proposal (including AV requests) and a maximum one-page CV by March 15th to: grnwrlds@yorku.ca
Inquiries may be addressed to:
Catriona Sandilands or Ella Soper-Jones
essandi@yorku.ca; jonesell@yorku.ca
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