CALL FOR PAPERS
The journal English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts, published at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, invites scholars to send to send article proposals for a special issue on
Solidarity—Responsibility—Culpability—Cooperation
Generations and the Environmental Crisis in Literature, Film, and Other Media
edited by Roberta Maierhofer (University of Graz, Austria) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
When Amitav Ghosh identifies “a crisis of the imagination” and suggests that climate fiction creates thought experiments that challenge the status quo, he positions cultural representations as voices of political resistance. As linguist Arran Stibbe has shown, the discourses of our everyday lives are permeated by stories that either endorse our destruction of the natural world or foster care and respect for our environment. Scholars such as Kathryn Yusoff have rightly emphasized that the use of the first-person plural (which we consciously employ in the previous sentence) in these discourses is a knotty issue, as it produces a universalism that erases inequalities and masks differences when it comes to past accountabilities for the environmental crisis and present as well as future obligations for mitigating its catastrophic consequences. In short, climate discourse often relies on binaries instead of emphasizing the potentials of overcoming them (and scholars such as Yusoff are not entirely excluded from this tendency).
Drawing on sources including Rob Nixon’s notion of the “slow violence” caused by anthroturbations and similar environmentally destructive activities, Adeline Johns-Putra’s observation that the discourse of the environmental crisis “is peppered with [...] references to parental obligations to posterity”, and Jonathan Schell’s reflections on cross-generational and cross-species concerns triggered by the heating-up of the Cold War in the early 1980s, this special issue will explore (human and nonhuman) generations in the context of the environmental crisis.
In contemporary discourses, boomers are often considered responsible for the climate emergency, while zoomers and millennials are the (more or less) innocent victims of past mistakes; boomers created a Texas-sized island of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean; and boomers occupying positions of power stymie millennials’ suggestions for mitigating the effects of environmental destruction, as they do not have to think beyond 2040. Of course, this blame game overgeneralizes and oversimplifies matters. But perhaps most importantly, such binary constructions radicalize discourse and curtail progress by ignoring the potentials of intergenerational cooperation.
Therefore, we would like to call for articles on English or American literature or literatures in English, also in their relationship with cinema and other media, that explore the role of age and generations, and questions of intergenerational solidarity, responsibility, culpability, and cooperation in view of the superhuman scale of geological/deep time that the environmental crisis confronts us with.
Please send a proposal by May 15th, using the form below.
Once the proposal is accepted you will be assigned a position in the journal's platform, where you can upload the article and see the peer review.
The deadline for uploading the article is September 15h.
The article must be composed using the house style. The editorial guidelines can be read here: Editorial guidelines.
Go to the upload area
https://ecfpeerflow.unive.it/abstracts/form/journal/10/281
➦
All proposed articles will go through double-blind revision by two peers. The outcome of the revision can be accessed on your personal page within 45 days from the submission of your article.
English literature started its publication in December 2014 and is a fully open access journal. It is indexed in Scopus, ERIH-plus, MLA Directory of periodicals, Crossref, DOAJ.
In full compliance with open-access policies, the journal applies no costs for publication of articles. The journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Contributors can keep their articles’ copyrights and are allowed to re-use their articles for further publication, provided they do not publish the same or modified version before one full year from its publication in English Literature.
English Literature’s policy is inspired by the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) ethical code.
If you have any query concerning the Journal or the present call, please write to english.lit@unive.it.
