Organizer: UNESCO CHAIR IN VULNERABILITY STUDIES, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, University of Hyderabad, India
About the Session
- When: 24 January 2023
- Time: 7 PM IST
- Platform: Google Meet
Talk by: SCOTT SLOVIC, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities, The University of Idaho, USA
Google Meet Link: Join Here
About the Talk
The human mind has limited ability to embrace the meaning of ecosystemic vulnerability, but immense capacity to appreciate the frailty of individual nonhuman organisms, which exhibit
precarity akin to our own. Even inhumanly strong and durable natural beings—such as whales, primates, and redwood trees—are legible to us as fellow “vulnerables,” individual, mortal, and representative of species susceptible to extinction. Such psychological tendencies as speculative empathy, empathetic self-projection
and self-erasure, and metaphorical emulation are aspects of what social scientists and literary scholars have dubbed “the arithmetic of compassion.” This lecture will explore these tendencies in such literary works as Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm (1977), Dale Peterson and
Jane Goodall’s Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People (1993), Julia Butterfly Hill’s The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the
Struggle to Save the Redwoods (2000), and Amy Donovan’s “Raw, Dense, and Loud: A Whale’s Perspective on Cold Water Energy” (2022). What’s at stake in our potential to grasp the vulnerability of the other, with the aid of literary representation, includes the possibility that we might glimpse our own potential extinction on the horizon before it’s too late to choose a different path.
About the Speaker
One of the most recognizable names in the study of “Literature and the Environment”, Scott Slovic is the co-editor, most recently, of such works as The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental
Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Nature and Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). His monographs include Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (U of Nevada P, 2008) and Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (U of Utah P,
1992). The founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), he edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. He
currently co-edits two book series, Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment (with Swarnalatha Rangarajan) and Routledge Environmental
Humanities (with Joni Adamson and Yuki Masami). A Fulbright scholar in Germany, Japan, China, and Turkey, Slovic also teaches the environmental writing
course in the Semester in the Wild Program at the Taylor Wilderness Research Station in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho.