More-Than-Human Poetics and Worlding

Worlding, to make or build a world, remains a main objective in the practice of geocriticism, a method of literary analysis or theory that incorporates the study of geographical space. A majority of the previous scholarship in literary geography and cartography, whether they be quantitative or qualitative approaches, attended to the genre of narrative, especially fiction. Further, the literary cartographers, the subjects who map space in literary works, are oftentimes recognized as, if not presumed to be, human. It is the goal of this seminar, therefore, to widen the scope of scholarship on literary cartography and geography by turning our critical attention to the genre and theories of poetry beyond human boundaries. Specially, the seminar invites papers that explore non-conventional and anti-anthropocentric ways to re-map the world through poetry and poetics. The questions this seminar seeks to discuss may include: how do writers undermine or dismantle human-centered boundaries by invoking nonhuman mapmakers in their works? How do such attempts to prioritize nonhuman activities in geographical formations change our conception of the world readily contextualized in the historical, political, and chronological accounts? Most importantly, by debunking humans as authoritative figures in cartographic narrative during the processes of literary creation and criticism, how can we, then, continue to investigate the human condition through the poetic and multispecies modes of worlding? 

Papers may approach topics including but not limited to:

more-than-human cartography/geography
comparative poetry and poetics
zoopoetics
geocriticism
ecocriticism
liteary cartography/geography
multispecies world-building
multispecies poetry and poetics
eco-poetry and -poetics