Guaranteed panel sponsored by the Thoreau Society
2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

What is the role of the personal voice in contemporary ecocritical scholarship? As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, conceptualizing climate change demands an awareness of both personal and planetary scales of transformation, yet traditional academic discourse has tended to discourage the use of personal history, anecdote, and the first-person voice. Our roundtable asks what’s at stake in the personal turn and a more intimate mode of literary-critical address. For this roundtable, we seek both excerpts from ecocritical writing in the personal voice and reflective/critical proposals that might trace the historical genealogy of the personal; consider the politics of voice vis-à-vis race and ethnicity, class, gender, and region; discuss marginalized efforts to bear witness; or offer reflexive meditations on our ties to the university and what more informal scholarship has to offer “lay” audiences.

This panel has a guaranteed slot on the conference program.

Proposals (maximum 200 words) for either/both creative or critical presentations and short CVs due by December 1st to Deanna Kreisel at deekaykay@icloud.com.