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Call for Papers

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2016 (/cfp/2016)/12 (/cfp/2016/12)/12 (/cfp/2016/12/12)

MFS Special Issue - The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of

Human Ecologies

deadline for submissions: March 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:

Modern Fiction Studies

contact email:
rmarzec@purdue.edu (mailto:rmarzec@purdue.edu)

The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies

Guest Editor: Robert P. Marzec
Deadline for Submissions: 1 March 2017

The editors of MFS invite essays that reflect on the significance of the anthropocene (as a concept and a planetary
materiality) in modern and contemporary fiction and film. In the course of the last few years the anthropocene as an
idea has gained considerable importance across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Marking the onset of a
new geological age, the anthropocene names a challenge on a scale that extends beyond any previous human historical
concern. Events such as mass extinction, sea level rise, food and water scarcity, mass migration, and the great
acceleration are both the result of but also beyond the humanas a species and a concept. This special issue seeks
essays that address the complexity of thinking the end(s) of anthropocentric vision and creation as manifested
variously in cultural, political, philosophical, and scientific formations. Essays may address recent fictional works
associated directly with the anthropogenic event of climate change (such as Ian McEwans Solar, Margaret
Atwoods Maddaddam series, Jeanette Wintersons The Stone Gods, Barbara Kingsolvers Flight Behavior, Claire Vaye
Watkinss Gold Fame Citrus); earlier twenty-first-century works of fiction that trace human planetary impact prior to the
development of the anthropocene as an idea; or works of fiction by authors like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi, Indra Sinha,
Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, Zakes Mda, J. M. Coetzee, Patricia Grace, and others that trace the
different geographies of anthopogenic impact.

We encourage authors to consider a broad spectrum of questions: How significant or successful have fictional responses
to the anthropocene been? Given the supremacy of the STEM disciplines, how might we articulate the importance of the
humanities and fictional imagination to the topic? How might we trouble the above-mentioned conceptualizations of
climate change in terms of the much longer history of the colonial exploitation of nature? To what extent has fiction
articulated different levels of what we identify as human? What representational challenges arise when Western and
Northern relations (scientific, literary, and others) confront non-Western and non-Northern relations to the
anthropocene? How might we trace a more nuanced understanding of human expansion and power in terms of unequal
planetary production, distribution, and resource allocation? How might we confront differences in human geological and
ecological influence in terms of the wealthy and the privileged, and the indigenous, the microminority, and the
subaltern? How might critical efforts in literary and humanistic studies address scientific and political theories of
mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability? How might we connect these fictional works to philosophical attempts to
theorize anthropogenic force, in works for instance by Heidegger, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Spivak, Agamben,
Haraway, Serres, Virilio, Said, Guha, Nixon, Chakrabarty, DeLoughrey, Handley, and others? These questions are not
meant to be exhaustive, and we invite other cultural, historical, and theoretical considerations.

Essays should be 6,000-8,500 words, including all quotations and bibliographic references, and should follow the MLA
Style Manual (7th edition) for internal citations and Works Cited. Please submit your essay via the online submission
form at the following web address: http//mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mfs

Queries should be directed to Robert P. Marzec (rmarzec@purdue.edu (mailto:rmarzec@purdue.edu)).

categories
ecocriticism and environmental studies (/category/ecocriticism-and-environmental-studies)

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