Events

30 June 2010

Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe: The Fourth Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction

Calls for papers

30th August - 1st September 2010
Monash Conference Centre, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Call for Papers - Changing the Climate: 4th Utopias Conference
In December 2001 the University of Tasmania hosted a successful conference around the theme of Antipodean Utopias.
In December 2005, Monash University hosted a second conference, around that of Imagining the Future, to mark the long-awaited publication of Fredric Jameson’s book Archaeologies of the Future. A third conference, Demanding the Impossible, followed in December 2007, again at Monash. Despite the apparent optimism of all three conference themes, dystopia remained a recurrent preoccupation in their discussions.
This fourth conference will directly address the questions of dystopia and catastrophe with special reference to a problem that increasingly haunts our imaginings of the future, that of actual or possible environmental catastrophe. As Jameson himself wrote in The Seeds of Time: ‘It seems … easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’.Hopefully, this conference will play some small part in changing that particular climate of opinion.
The conference invites papers from scholars, writers and others interested in the interplay between ecology and ecocriticism, utopia, dystopia and science fiction.
Abstracts (approx. 100-150 words) should be sent by 30 June 2010 by e-mail.

English Language and Literature

Organisation:

A conference organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University