Fractured Ecologies: Call for contributions

Fractured Ecologies: Call for contributions to an edited collection on environmental criticism and radical experimental writing

Since the 1990s, ecocriticism has influenced the ways we study literature, but fractures remain. If environmental scholars are to continue to challenge conventional approaches to literary study, inventive methods must be continually developed and improved. British scholar Harriet Tarlo has made a call for environmental engagement with experimental writing, and reminds us that “very few eco-critics engage with innovative or experimental writing.” Franca Bellarsi agrees, and emphasizes the real need to research “green ethics in different avant-garde practices.”

And while there has been some preliminary ecocritical work on what can be called experimental nature-writing, so far the most radical writing forms have largely been overlooked. Wild avant-garde writing is a limit case of sorts, and the difficulties in studying such forms are impossible to really avoid. But the lack of ecological perspectives on experimental writing justifies and demands more attention. Moreover, conventional academic publishing outlets have promoted a rather homogenous and monocultural understanding of scholarship that excludes inventive fringe observations. Therefore, Fractured Ecologies welcomes rigorous and irreverent papers that address radical experimental writing and other borderline manifestations in an environmental context. The fundamental question that Fractured Ecologies will attempt to address is: How does radical experimental writing contribute to the ways we think about ecology? Suggested topics may include but are not limited to discussions of ecology in a wide sense and:

Aleatory writing
Altar Poetry
Assemblage
ASCII art
Bizzaro fiction
Comic jam
Caligram
Chance procedures
Concrete poetry
Cut-up/fold-in
Dada writing
Dictionaraoke
Digital poetry
Exquisite Corpse
Fax art
Fluxus poetry
Found text
Fragments and remnants
Glorious plagiarism
Graffiti and wildstyle
Guerrilla semiotics
Haptic poetry
Imagism
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
Mechanical narrative agency
Pictography
Psychography
Round-robin texts
Runes
Sound poetry
Surrealist writing
Visual poetry
Words in Freedom

This project is under contract with an independent academic publisher. Contributors will receive a free copy of the book. Please send paper abstracts of 500 words and a working title to Chad Weidner at c.weidner-ucr-dot-nl before 1 January 2014. Final essays will be between 7,000-9,000 words in length and should conform to the MLA documentation style. Final papers will be due before 1 July 2014. Please email with questions.

Dr. Chad Weidner
Assistant Professor, English and Film
UCR Utrecht University
Lange Noordstraat 1
4331 CB Middelburg
The Netherlands