Ecotheories Colloquium: 

“Ecology/Echography: Heidegger's Hut—Three Displacements” 

Cary Wolfe, Rice University, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English. He has written on a range of topics, from American poetry to bioethics. He is series editor for Minnesota Press's Posthumanities Series

Registration free and open to PU faculty, staff, and students For updates, please visit: english.princeton.edu/events/colloquia/

This year’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium focuses on ecotheories and ecopoetics—the work of scholars for whom ecology becomes a foundation for theories of literature, and for whom literature becomes a foundation for theories of ecology. Some ecocritics have approached the question of literature and the environment using a representational framework, asking: what more-than-human forms or ecological relationships do writers represent in language? In this colloquium we want to ask a different set of questions: What ecotheories become possible if poiesis (or environment-building) rather than representation guides analysis? What material, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities open up if we consider art not as a mirror but as a site of interaction for human and non-human actors? What are the processes, kinetics, and performances of ecological thinking? How do we de-metaphorize and re-materialize terms like ecology and ecosystem? What possibilities does such a recasting open up for literary form and literary theory? Finally, how might ecotheories help construct a decolonial ethics and politics for our contemporary moment? 

A speaker series co-sponsored by: The English Department’s Contemporary Poetry Colloquium The High Meadows Environmental Institute The Environmental Media Lab The Bain-Swiggett Poetry Fund The Effron Center for the Study of America The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities The University Center for Human Values