Unfortunatley, due to recent events, the Annual Conference has been cancelled for Spring 2020. However, due to overwhelming support for the topic and the willingness of participants to revisit the issue at a later date, the confernence is now slated to take place in Fall of 2020. Please check back in August for more details.
Climate Fictions
2020 GCLR Graduate Student Conference
Venue: HSSB, McCune Conference Room, UCSB campus
Time: April 18-19, 2020
As climate change has become a central topic of discussion, laced with the uncertainty of tomorrow, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to reframe their conversations with a focus on this ubiquitous topic as it has been interpreted in literary fiction, as well as within the arts.
Originally coined by Dan Bloom, Climate-Fiction, popularly known as Cli-Fi, is a type of fiction that explores what the earth might become if climate change continues at its current rate, and specifically if humans do not intervene to save the planet.
As many successful authors, such as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula Le Guin, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, and Leslie Marmon Silko, have contributed to promulgating the topics of climate change and global warming into the public eye, Cli-Fi has gained prominence as more than a fringe genre.
Your paper can discuss the following questions:
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In terms of climate change, and the mediums that engage with it, are genre fictions, fict-documentaries, mainstream novels, poetry, works of nonfiction, and film, really so separable?
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What does each bring to the table?
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How do they overlap, and where do they diverge?
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How does climate fiction reflect and/or imagine the nonhuman/posthuman experience of environmental change and destruction?
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As climate change compels us to rethink geopolitics, how does it complicate questions of post-coloniality?
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How are people from around the world responding to climate change?
Please send abstracts to Christene d’Anca at christene_danca@ucsb.edu by January 25, 2020.
Keynote Speaker
John Shoptaw has been writing about and teaching ecopoetry and ecopoetics in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Currently, he is exploring the ecopoetics and ecopoetry of climate change. His most recent publication is a climate fiction, titled "Whoa!" that is a retelling of Ovid's Metamorphoses (book 2), in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Among his other publications, is Time's Beach, a collection of poems that evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed, and On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry, a study of Ashbery's poems through the form of a flow chart.
This is no longer the current schedule - Please check back in August for updates.
Saturday, April 18
McCune Conference Room
6020 HSSB
University of California, Santa Barbara
9 :00 Breakfast and Coffee
9 :45 Opening remarks offered by Sven Spieker, GCLR Director, and Christene d’Anca, GCLR Research Coordinator
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
10 :00 John Shoptaw, University of California, Berkeley
A Climate-Changed Ecopoetics
Discussion
11 :30 Lunch
SITUATING CLIMATE FICTION
Panel Chair : Pujita Guja, University of California, Santa Barbara
1 :00 Lydia Borowicz, University of California, Santa Barbara
Performing Carbon Ruins: Climate Futures as Embodied Potential
1 :20 Margarita Delcheva, University of California, Santa Barbara
Minimalism and the Revelatory Tool of Apocalypse in Ben Lerner’s Novel 10:04 and Béla Tarr’s Film The Turin Horse
1 :40 David Vivian, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chaos in the Anthropocene: Subjectivity, Time, and the Role of Fiction in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
2 :00 Wendy Sun, University of California, Santa Barbara
Climate Fiction as World Literature? A Case Study on The Wandering Earth
Discussion
2 :45 Coffee Break
HUMAN/NON-HUMAN BINARY(?)
Panel Chair : Ben Beitler, University of California, Berkeley
3 :00 Rachel Feldman, University of California, Santa Barbara
Green, Beige, White: Visualizing the Ends of the Earth
3:20 Michelle Robertson, University of California, Irvine
Nuclear Colonialism at the Twilight of Humanity: Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne
3:40 Maxximilian Seijo, University of California, Santa Barbara
Ecological Accounting: Transcending Essentialist Materialism in Marx, Heidegger and Vitalism
Discussion
RECEPTION
Sunday, April 19
McCune Conference Room
6020 HSSB
University of California, Santa Barbara
9 :00 Breakfast and Coffee
9 :45 Opening remarks offered by Christene d’Anca, GCLR Research Coordinator
CLIMATE… FICTION?
Panel Chair : Christene d’Anca, University of California, Santa Barbara
10 :00 Sage Freeburg, University of California, Santa Barbara
Nuance and the Anthropocene: Fictions in Animal Conservation Efforts
10 :20 Kio Griffith, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Forecastings of Science Fiction Novels in Postwar Japan: From Atomic Ground-Zero to the Industrious
10 :40 Morgan Delgado, Arizona State Univeristy
Can A Climate Film Lead to Corporate Change? The Intersection of Film, Science, and Corporate Scandals
11 :00 Sydney Lane, University of California, Santa Barbara
Imagining Climate Migration Anxiety as the Horror of Interdependence in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) and Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara (2018)
Discussion
11 :30 Coffee Break
CLIMATE FICTIONS – UNIQUE REPRESENTATIONS
Panel Chair : Surojit Kayal, University of California, Santa Barbara
11 :45 John Schranck, University of California, Santa Barbara
Storms of Our (Un)Doing: Shakespeare’s AnthropoTempest and the “Brave New World”
12 :05 Olivia Leiter, University of California, Riverside
Climate Change and the Apocalypse Through the Lens of Bruce Conner’s Crossroads
Discussion
12 :25 Closing remarks offered by Christene d’Anca, GCLR Research Coordinator