Reading the Earth: Geology, Memory, and Relational Poetics (NeMLA)
Newport, RI
Event: NeMLA
Across contemporary literary and cultural studies, increasing attention has been devoted to the ways in which geological matter shapes cultural imagination, environmental memory, and literary form. Rocks, minerals, fossils, sediments, ruins, and other more-than-living material formations are no longer understood merely as settings or symbols, but as archives of deep time, environmental change, historical violence, and planetary entanglement.
This panel invites papers exploring how literature engages with the Earth as a site of memory, relation, and meaning-making. We are particularly interested in approaches that examine geological formations, landscapes, material traces, planetary archives, and sedimented histories as participants in literary and cultural processes rather than passive backdrops to human experience.
Possible topics include geologies of memory; deep time and literary temporality; environmental trauma and material archives; fossils, ruins, and traces; sacred landscapes and earth-based imaginaries; extraction, waste, and environmental justice; posthumanist and new materialist approaches to literature; relational poetics; and the intersections of geology, ecology, and cultural memory.
We welcome contributions addressing literary and cultural texts from any historical period, linguistic tradition, or geographical region, as well as comparative and transnational perspectives.
The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included. Please clearly indicate in your submission whether you wish to participate in person or remotely.
All abstract submissions must be submitted through the NeMLA portal https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22630. Please note that the submission window for individual abstracts officially opens June 15 and closes September 30.
Pawel Piszczatowski