The NCLN is pleased to announce that Paul March-Russell will be giving the keynote speech at our third annual symposium on: ‘Of Borders and Ecologies: Comparative Literature and the Environment’.
Paul is Specialist Associate Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and he has published widely on postcolonialism, science fiction and romantic legacies – very often with a comparative spin. He also edits the science fiction journal Foundation.
Paul’s keynote speech is entitled: ‘Combined and Uneven Developments: World Literature and Ecocriticism’. An abstract for his speech can be found below:
This paper responds to the Warwick Research Collective’s ‘new theory of world-literature’ published in 2015. There, the authors argue that world literature must be undergirded by a Marxist analysis that proffers a world-historical view of the unevenness in economic and cultural production. The authors exemplify their argument by making comparisons with Franco Moretti’s application of Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world systems to literary development, and to the application of Energy Studies to literary analysis. In this paper, I will broadly accept their argument but I will also contend that their criticism of Comparative Literature is misplaced. Instead, I will show, via an analysis of how the discipline emerged, that their real target is the traditional Marxist bete noire of Formalism. I will argue that Comparative Literature has already evolved beyond its Formalist inheritance and that part of this evolution has involved an engagement with Marxism. Rather than proposing a ‘new theory of world literature’, I will argue that we need to draw upon the resources that Comparative Literature already offers scholars, and to apply them not so much to a Marxist analysis but an ecocritical one, in which the centrality of the human subject is questioned and the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are disturbed. Comparative Literature’s inherent questioning of national and linguistic borders, as well as the emphases upon translation and translocation, suggest an affinity with ecocritical theory that can advance the kind of world-historical view favoured by the Warwick Research Collective without the need for a revamping of Marxism or a demolition of the discipline.
We look forward to welcoming Paul to our symposium.
Northern Comparative Literature Network 