Call for Papers
Women's Nature Writing: New Perspectives on Polish and Russian
Literature
28th - 31st of May 2009
University of Tampere, School of Modern Languages and Translation
Studies
Organizers: Department of Russian Language and Culture and Research
Project: "Generation, National Identity and the Body: Polish and Russian
Women's Writing in Transformation"
The aim of the international conference is not only to study
environmental debates but, through them, to examine the myriad ways in
which Russian and Polish culture and nature relationships are
negotiated. The conference will examine how natural and human worlds are
intertwined and how they are evaluated within processes of
identification concerning nationality, race, social and gendered
contexts, among others. The conference is motivated by a growing
interest among literary and cultural studies scholars during the past
decade to examine nature and environment from a cultural studies point
of view. The ecocritical study of nature in particular has taken an
"earth-centred approach" to literary studies. At its centre are
questions concerning the relationships between culture and nature, human
and animal. We ask how nature is being constructed by cultural
artefacts, and how various representations of nature may affect the
practice of environmental policy. The questions of our conference will
follow the discussion originated by ecocritical scholars while reading
nature as an example of cultural rhetoric. The questions will deal with
reciprocal relationships between humans and land, environmental ethics
and representations of nature in literary work. The questions to be
posed are, for example, how physical setting is drawn in novels? What
are the values connected with ecological questions? What are the
metaphors given to landscapes in the products of culture and literature?
The ecocritical approach of literary studies on nature having its roots
in Western studies, has its equivalent Russian scholarship. In the last
ten or so years, there has been a strong scholarly interest among
Russian philologists, too, to examine national traditions, i.e. how
nature has been represented in Soviet-Russian literature, what kinds of
metaphors and tropes have been used in order to paint the "Russian"
natural landscape.
However, very little has been said about women's ambivalent response to
the nature/culture debate. Apart from a few random essays, there is
almost no scholarly work on Russian women's literary contribution to the
understanding of the environment and the (Soviet) Russian natural world.
Our conference will pay special attention to this challenging, yet
neglected, task; the relationship between gender and nature. The papers
will examine how women writers have contributed to the Russian
investigation of nature, and whether we can find connections between
patterns and differences between historical texts of women's nature
writing. The majority of papers will be concerned with Russian literary
history (19th-20th centuries and contemporary literature) which will be
compared with Polish literary material.
Accordingly, while bringing together contemporary Western cultural and
literary methodological approaches (e.g. ecocriticism, ecofeminism,
ecophilosophy) and Russian and Polish ecological ways of seeing, the
conference will open up a new field for a basic study of Russian culture
and literature. The conference offers a new perspective to the study of
nature in national traditions connected with gender and challenged by
contemporary aspects of global environmental crises.
The conference "Women's Nature Writing: New Perspectives on Polish and
Russian Literature" invites scholars of Russian and Polish women's
literature to offer new insights into this emerging field of inquiry. We
propose to study the topic in the framework of the following categories
and contexts:
- nature-culture negotiations and representations
- nature/landscape as a category of identity
- genre and gender in Russian or Polish "nature writing"
- national traditions of nature writing and gender
- memory and landscape
- body and nature in women's literature
- gendered metaphors of nature
- metaphors of land and ecological knowledge
- civilization and wilderness
- environmental crisis in literature and popular culture
- environmental ethics
The working languages are English and Russian.
Deadline for abstracts is 28th February 2009. Abstracts (max. 500 words)
should be submitted electronically to arja.rosenholm[at]uta.fi and
marja.rytkonen[at]uta.fi. The final programme will be announced in April
2009.
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