From: Timothy Clark [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 13 April 2009 19:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: Timothy Clark
Subject: call for papers: Deconstruction and Environmentalism
Oxford Literary Review, vol. 31.1 (July 2010), call for papers.
Deconstruction and Environmentalism
"Global warming ... is...traumatic ... in attacking the fundamental
premises on
which are based our capacity to understand or adequately respond" (David
Wood, "On Being Haunted by the Future")
"the ecological facts of life threaten to challenge our most dearly held
political
values: justice, freedom, and democracy." (Bob Pepperman
Taylor 'Environmental Ethics and Political Theory')
"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people"
(David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human
Prospect)
In what ways can the environmental crisis become, belatedly, an explicit
issue
for deconstructive thinking? Is the absence of the topic of climate
change in
Derrida's work, "an increasingly signal absence, amounting almost to an
occlusion" (Tom Cohen)? Does the concept of a "carbon footprint" entail
an
undoing of given distinctions of public and the private of which,
seemingly,
Derrida never dreamed or has it, in some sense, always been at issue in
his
texts? Is the widely heard phrase "the death of nature" a piece of
intellectual
incoherence or index of the crossing of an imponderable threshold?
Environmental issues question given boundaries between intellectual
disciplines -- overpopulation and pollution, for instance, are social,
moral,
political, medical, technical, ethical and "animal rights" issues, all
at once. For
Bruno Latour the intellectual force of the radical environmental
movement
("deep ecology," "social ecology," "ecofeminism") is that, in openly
destabilising
the fact/value distinction upon which so much modern thinking and
practice is
based, it also demystifies "Science" as a political ideology, calling
scientists to
new forms of thought and responsibility. Likewise, in the fields of
literary and
cultural criticism, is the acknowledged intellectual weakness of some
so-
called "ecocriticism" best recuperated as an effect of the massive
resistance
of environmental issues to inherited modes of thought?
Since the "environment," ultimately, means "everything," in what ways
are
further refinement and demarcations required, or is the challenge that
literally
of, "thinking everything at once"?
OLR 31.1 will be open to papers on these and related questions, maximum
length c. 6,000 words.
For more on the OLR see
http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/olr
Deadline for expressions of interest: June 30, 2009. Copy date December
31,
2009. End of editing process April, 2010.
Contact. Timothy Clark, English Studies, University of Durham, UK, DH1
5YN.
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