Deadline: January 6, 2025
Contact: Phoenix Wang, Cornell University
Email: [email protected]
Panel: Gothic Air / Atmospheric Gothic (ASLE 2025 panel)
This panel seeks to explore the relationship between the Gothic and the air/atmosphere through an ecocritical and interdisciplinary lens.
Gothic representations of air/ atmosphere are effective sites for reflecting on disturbing forms of transcorporeal encounters indexed by pollution, toxicity, and other porous agents that break down the corporeal and affective boundaries between human and nonhuman entities. From another angle, these aerial and atmospheric hauntings are also channels for rethinking the connectivity, interactions, and entanglements between human and ecological bodies, which are often unevenly distributed due to anthropocentric, speciesist, and dualistic epistemologies. Prominent gothic tropes such as the monstrous, the spectral, the abject, and the uncanny in representing the air/ atmosphere similarly problematize these understandings, destabilizing the human being as a bounded body and human-nature separatism. Moreover, with growing academic interest in areas such as ecoGothic, ecohorror, and Anthropocene Gothic, it is worth considering the literary representations of air and atmosphere in these specific genres and modes.
This panel considers several questions: Are there any ways to conceptualize “Gothic air” and “Aerial/Atmospheric Gothic”? How are air and atmosphere represented in (eco)Gothic literature? How do gothic tropes and conventions register atmospheric concerns? Thinking about various planetary ecological issues in the Anthropocene, what can uneasy forms of air/ atmosphere indicate about these issues? What types of fear and anxieties do they generate? Can they be mobilized as anti-ecophobic vehicles facilitating interspecies care, respect, and solidarity? How can we understand the ecocritical configurations of the gothic and the air at the intersection with other critical lenses such as medical humanities, posthumanism, new materialism, and affect theory?
We treat “(eco)gothic” and “air/atmosphere” in more capacious terms. “Gothic” is broadly understood not just as a genre but also as a mode, trope, and convention. “Air/atmosphere” is also understood as multifold. It can refer to a natural element, an environmental medium, and a figurative term for a quality or an ambiance.
We welcome scholars working on Anglophone literature in any period.
We are interested in topics including, but not limited to, the following:
- Conceptualizing “Gothic Air/ Atmospheric Gothic”
- Air/atmosphere in ecogothic and ecohorror genres
- Gothic air/atmosphere in the Anthropocene
- Air pollution, toxicity, mutation
- Atmospheric dimensions of decomposition, decay, and death
- gothic air and climate crises
- transcorporeality through air/atmosphere
- atmospheric agents and violence
- immaterial traces and aerial/atmospheric haunting
- Air as a gothic eco-media
- Gothic air and atmospheric sciences
- Gothic air/atmosphere as forms of interspecies connectivity
- The eco-affective valences of gothic air /atmosphere
Please send an abstract of around 200 words and a brief bio to [email protected] by January 6th, 2025.