22/10/2022
Navigating Water in the Fantastique: A Virtual Roundtable
Join us on Thursday 27th October, 10-11.30am AEDT for a virtual roundtable discussing human-water relations in Fantastique film and literature.
This event follows Reading & Screening the Fantastique's previous roundtable held in 2021 on ‘Haunted Space’, where speakers discussed perspectives on domestic space, isolation, and fears of dehumanisation as represented in Fantastique film and literature.
We are now interested in exploring the representation of human-water relations in similar texts. Over the past decade, there has been increasing scholarly interest in how various genre fictions interrogate human-nature relationships. An emphasis on the representation of water is just one facet of what is a larger examination of how film, literature, and other art forms convey diverse understandings of the more-than-human.
In this roundtable, our speakers will discuss the depiction of human-water relations across a range of texts, including works that sit within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and the gothic. We hope that such a discussion will help further ecocritical understandings of Fantastique texts, particularly given how both human and non-human experiences of the world have been, and will continue to be, drastically altered by the climate crisis.
Join us for this important conversation via Zoom on Thursday 27th October, 10-11.30am AEDT.
This roundtable will be held via Zoom and parts of the event will be recorded. Zoom details will be sent to ticket holders the day before the event.
Speakers:
DR GEOFF BOUCHER is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Deakin University. He is the author of a number of books on historical materialism and continental philosophy, including Understanding Marxism (2012), Adorno Reframed (2012) and The Charmed Circle of Ideology (2008). He is also the author (with Matthew Sharpe) of Zizek and Politics (2010) and The Times Will Suit Them (2008). Geoff is working on a project around the role of fiction in the resurgence of authoritarian populism. This flows from his recent book Habermas and Literature: The Public Sphere and the Social Imaginary (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He has just published a series of articles on the authoritarian personality and contemporary culture in Thesis Eleven, The Berlin Journal of Critical Theory and International Critical Thought.
Paper title: On the Rarity of Intelligent Marine Aliens in Sci-Fi
DR ALLISON CRAVEN is Associate Professor of Screen Studies and English at James Cook University, Australia, based on Bebegu-Yumba campus in Townsville. Her research is on global fairy tale and gothic narrative, and Australian Cinema. She is the author of two monographs: Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminisms, Masculinities and Wonder Cinema (Peter Lang, 2017); and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (Anthem, 2016). She is co-editor with Dr Jess Balanzategui of a forthcoming anthology Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/materiality, Regionality (Amsterdam University Press); and, with Dr Di Sandars, is co-editing an anthology on maritime Gothic currently titled Gothic in the Oceanic South: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters (contracted with Routledge). She is an editor of Anthem Film and Culture series.
Paper title: Sunlight, Submersion and Amphibious Beings: Thinking With Water and Australian Gothic
DONGYANG LI is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies of the University of Sydney. His current research focuses on the cultural construction of China’s oceanscape. He is committed to cultural studies with interdisciplinary approaches as well as introducing critical ocean studies and blue humanities into the study of/beyond China’s ocean.
Paper title: Imaginations and Fantasies: The Emerging Oceanic Structure of Feeling within China in Late 19th and Early 20th Century
This event will be chaired by DR RACHEL FETHERSTON, a researcher in the environmental humanities with an interest in genre fiction, the more-than-human, and understanding reader response to environmental literature. She is currently a sessional academic at Deakin University where she teaches literature and is a co-convener of Reading & Screening the Fantastique.
Reading & Screening the Fantastique is an interdisciplinary research network that explores science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, horror and the supernatural across the art forms. The group consists of postgraduates and academics working within film studies, literary studies, creative writing, education, bioethics, technoscience, gender studies, media studies and more. First established at Deakin University, the group extends beyond this to scholars around Australia and internationally. You can find them on Twitter at .
A roundtable discussion of the representation of human-water relations in Fantastique film and literature.
