Ruins are all the rage today.

In a world where it is becoming increasingly apparent that the effects of climate change will be catastrophic, it is hard not to imagine all the future ruins that surround us. In a world where ongoing wars and genocidal violence across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Africa and Central Asia, we are constantly subjected to many places in the process of becoming ruins. In our own field, the eternal and repeated calls of the end of literature are forecasting the ruination of our livelihoods and the end of a certain mode of social organization. 

Of course, things are not distributed equally across time and space. Places are impacted by climate change in different ways and to different degrees. Furthermore, it is different to live the active ruination of your life than to see it on social media and television.

Literature has had a lot to say about ruins over a long span of time, with such notable participants as Francesco Petrarca, Francisco de Quevedo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Octavio Paz. From within that eternally ruined disciplines of literary studies has, perhaps, emerged a discourse of the ruin that scholars such as Susan Stewart and Aleksandra Prica have only begun to investigate.

This panel welcomes interdisciplinary and comparative investigations of

• The intersection of ruins and literature
• The end of literature and the literacy crisis
• Lives in ruins
• Affect and ruins
• War and ruination
• Climate change and ruination
• Speculative fiction and ruins
• Uneven distributions of ruination across the globe