By Rebecca Godwin, ASLE/SAMLA Liaison, Professor of English and Director of Barton Writing Center, Barton College.
As an affiliated group of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), ASLE held two sessions at SAMLA 87 in Durham, North Carolina, in November 2015. Embracing the conference theme In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts, participants explored how the arts help to make us better stewards of the earth by drawing our attention to it. ASLE sessions began with a question echoing John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems.
The first session, Can the Arts Save the Earth?: Sea and Seafarer, featured three papers exploring writers’ thematic use of the sea. Jana Giles of University of Louisiana at Monroe presented “Language, Nature, and the Other: Conrad’s Avant-Garde Sublime in Typhoon.” Also drawing on Conrad, Cameron Dodworth of Methodist University explored Conrad’s sea stories in relation to Darwin and visual artists such as Monet and Turner in “Cultural Impressionism, Visual Arts, Scientific Naturalism, and the Sea in Joseph Conrad.” Kelly Walter Carney, also of Methodist University, led audience members to consider history and psychology in “Mastering the Sea, Mastering the Self: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.”
The second ASLE session, Can the Arts Save the Earth?: Environments, Real and Imagined, allowed three scholars to share their thinking about various genres’ environmental influence. Kaitlyn Willy of University of North Texas posed the question “Can Science Fiction Save the Earth?” and provided hope that it raises awareness of environmental desecration. Ashley Hogan of Meredith College and Anna Panszczyk presented “The Power of Magical Forests through the Photography of Ellie Davies and into 20th-Century Middle Grade Fiction,” and Hill Taylor of Oregon Health and Science University discussed “Ecotopia Revisited in Image: The Imagined (and Enacted) Peril and Promise of Portland.”
All six of these presentations elicited lively conversations, not only about literature and film but also about people’s environmental efforts on their campuses across the United States. The application of the arts to the practical matter of living well on earth clearly was a driving force for both presenters and audience members at these two ASLE/SAMLA sessions.
