Lunch Lecture - Kate Rigby (Literature)
Humanities beyond the Human: The Ecological Turn in Literary Studies
Prof. Dr. Kate Rigby
Monash University
Literature
External Senior Fellow
| When |
Dec 03, 2015
from 01:15 PM to 02:00 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Freiburg University, KG I, Lecture Hall 1015 |
| Contact Name | Nikolaus Binder |
| Contact Phone | +49 (0)761 203-97398 |
| Attendees |
Öffentlich / Open to public |
| Add event to calendar |
vCal
iCal
|
Since the early 1990s, a major paradigm shift has been underway in literary studies, which commonly goes by the name of “ecocriticism”. In addition to the new questions it has brought to the field of literary studies, ecocriticism has also significantly reshaped its methodology. Whereas it has been common for literary scholars to draw upon other humanities or social science disciplines to inform their research, ecocritics turn also to the biological sciences, geology, physics, meteorology, science studies, and biosemiotics, repositioning literary history and hermeneutics within a more-than-human frame of reference. In this way, ecocriticism has contributed to the emergence of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of the “environmental humanities”. Embracing also such game-changing sub-disciplines as ecophilosophy, ecolinguistics, environmental history, multi-species ethnography, and eco-religious studies, the environmental humanities brings fundamental questions of value and meaning, responsibility and rights, care and cruelty, compassion and justice to the major socio-ecological challenges facing the world today.
