Conference Schedule

Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions

International Symposium at the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France

Nouvelle Maison de la Recherche E 412

Friday, June 17, 2016

900am – Conference Opening

915am-1015am – Keynote

Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA, Dogs as Sensory Extensions of Self: A Gift

1015am-1040am – Coffee Break

1045am-1230pm – Morning Session: Man and Bear

Benedict Fullalove, Alberta College of Art & Design, Canada, Thinking Bears

James R. Goebel, University of California, Irvine, USA, “The bear was all cut open, it was full of people”: The Creaturely and the Meaty in Herzog’s Grizzly Man

Oliver Völker, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Germany, “Chaos, hostility, and murder”: Animals as Metaphor in Werner Herzog´s Grizzly Man

1230pm-200pm – Lunch 

200pm-300pm – Keynote

Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, Companions in Restoration: Buffalo Ranching as Interspecies and Intercommunity Reconciliation, The Case of Dan O’Brien’s Wild Idea

300pm-325pm – Tea Break

330pm-515pm – Afternoon Session: Writing Against Extinction

Geneviève Dragon, Université de Bretagne, Rennes 2, Cellam, groupe Phi, Man and Wolf: The Intanglible Border Between Nature and Culture in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing

Elizabeth Curry, University of Oregon, USA, Animal Sacrifice and Survival in TC Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done

Qianqian Cheng, Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, Extinction, Ancient and New: Loren Eiseley’s poetics and a Bone Hunter’s Meditation on Humanity and Animality

The conference program can be downloaded here.

 

Keynote: Tom Lynch

We are very excited to announce that Tom Lynch will be delivering one of the two keynote addresses for the Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions International Symposium at the University of Toulouse. Dr. Lynch is a professor of English and core faculty member of the Place Studies program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests include cross-cultural ecocriticism and place-conscious literary studies with an emphasis on bioregionalism, specifically in the American West and the Australian Outback. He is the author of Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (2008) and co-editor of (among others) Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley (2012), and The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012). Dr. Lynch is also editor for the journal Western American Literature.

Keynote: Scott Slovic

We are very excited to announce that Scott Slovic will be delivering one of the two keynote addresses for the Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions International Symposium at the University of Toulouse. Dr. Slovic is a professor and the department chair of English at the University of Idaho. His research interests include ecocriticism, American and international environmental literature, Native American literature, and sustainability studies. He is the author of Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (2010) as well as co-editor of (among others) The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011), Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (2014), and Currents of the Universal Being: Explorations in the Literature of Energy (2015).

 

Call for Papers

Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions

International Symposium at Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France

June 17, 2016

Keynotes: Scott Slovic (U of Idaho) and Tom Lynch (U of Nebraska-Lincoln)

This symposium invites papers that reclaim the often-neglected spaces—real, fantasized or imaginary—that humans share with other species. “Companion” is to be understood as living and evolving closely together rather than simply being involved in a friendly relationship. American culture, like all cultures, is not of exclusively human making; other species play an essential role in its development. It is difficult to imagine what stories would be told of America without horses, buffalo, dogs, corn, or apple trees, to mention just a few of the species that have shared the land with humans. Such mutual co-evolutions might be compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the assemblage constituted by the orchid and the wasp. Contact with other species (as pets, beasts of burden, food, ornaments etc.) modifies human culture and reciprocally alters the species concerned. Rather than falling into neat divisions this encounter creates contested territories and complicated lines of suture between species. Instead of drawing boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the animal, contemporary theorists (Haraway, Latour, Barad) have drawn attention to their inseparability and their multiple forms of co-dependence. Donna Haraway goes so far as to use the portmanteau word “naturecultures” to draw attention to the intimate, mutating associations of different species.

Semiotic theories have insisted that sign-making and sign-interpreting distinguish man from other species yet rather than being the product of culture, this distinction is its fragile foundation. Derrida, following a long line of philosophers, interrogates what he sees as imbricated boundary lines in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In the rebus that these lines darkly draw is perhaps the key to a revised perception of the beleaguered us-them duality. We invite participants to consider whether and how the arts can make a place for other species, rather than affirming the separation of nature and culture. How do cultural productions represent inter-species contact? Does the homocentricity of language confine them to anthropomorphic projection? Do artists and writers necessarily affirm man’s superiority? Do they replicate the biblical schema, making man the steward? Can other kinds of relation be imagined that take into account reciprocity and foster respect? In what ways is it possible to attend to what Haraway calls the “significant otherness” of non-humans? Is there such a thing as otherness and difference if we are caught in meshworks of relationships? What ethical stand can we think of when self and other have become “molecular”? What new meanings can we infuse into the word compassion when the other-self division has been discarded?

Among the many works that could be investigated in this perspective are those of writers like Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, Aldo Leopold, Rick Bass, Barry Lopez, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, Rudi Weems, filmmakers like Walt Disney or Robert Redford, artists like George Caitlin, John James Audubon, Harrison Begay, Jimmie Durham.

SEND titles and 150 word abstracts by September 5, 2015 to harding@univ-tlse2.fr and claire.cazajous@univ-tlse2.fr