Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Biennial Conference, Davis, California, June 26-30, 2019

“To me, it's a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization,” says Werner Herzog, “where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness [?] are acceptable, but no one embraces the last speakers of a language”. How might biology and language illuminate each other as metaphors, and with what implications for the imperative to preserve under the sign of extinction? What optics for the environmental humanities await us at sites of political and ecological catastrophe? In the spirit of the Indian critic G. N Devy, who describes near-extinct languages as “the avant-garde margins of experience” at which knowledge is truly possible, we invite papers that engage with the inseparability of ecology and culture, and that reflect on the imperative to erase, mass-produce, or let live entire life-worlds of experience. By what politics of cuteness, function, or cadence have we held out against the loss of diversity? How might the units we assume in speaking of extinction — the species, the culture — have denied us other, intricate links between bodies and languages? 

1. ART BUILDING 217

   Chair: Hande Gurses, University of Toronto and Kaushik Ramu, University of Pennsylvania

   • Nascent Marvell

     John Yargo, University of Massachusetts Amherst

   • Metaphorical Animals Beyond Extinction: Species Loss and Language in Éric Chevillard’s Sans l’orang-outan and Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream

     Ida Marie Olsen, Ghent University

   •  Marius The Giraffe: Poetics and Politics of Killing Animals

     Hande Gurses, University of Toronto

   • Paradise and Extinction in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga

     Arnab Chakraborty, University of Kansas

   • Butting Up Against the Limit: Extinction and the Poetic Line in Jorie Graham's Fast

     Shannon K. Winston, Princeton University

   • On Unclassifiability

     Kaushik Ramu, University of Pennsylvania