Posts
“The Afterlives of Pastoral”
University of Queensland
July 4-5, 2014
Deadline: January 10, 2014
Since William Empson published his landmark Some Versions of Pastoral in 1935,
the ancient mode that is pastoral has been re-visioned and re-analysed, and a
range of scholarly readings has confirmed there is no easy or comfortable way
of pinning down just how pastoral operates either in Virgil’s Eclogues or in the literature the
poem has inspired since the Renaissance. Annabel Patterson in her Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to
Valéry (1987) focused on why Virgilian pastoral has echoed and
continues to echo through western literary history, arguing “it is not what
pastoral is that should matter to us”; what is far more useful is to
consider “how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions
have used pastoral for a range of functions and intentions that
the Eclogues first articulated” (7; emphasis in original). In
1996, pastoral scholar Paul Alpers referred to “a happy confusion of
definitions,” and with a linguistic nod to Empson, confirmed “there are as many
versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it” and
that “‘pastoral’ can still be a word to conjure with” (What Is Pastoral? 8).
Over the last twenty-five years, there has been a resurgence
of interest not only in the theory and criticism of pastoral but in literature
that in various ways is in dialogue with the mode. For instance, Seamus Heaney
self-consciously writes back to Virgil, and Stanley Fish has noted telling elements
of pastoral in Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games (2008–2010). Environmental criticism, too,
has found a dialogue with this tradition to be a productive way of thinking
about the human/nature relationships in which so many current environmental
issues are embedded.
This symposium invites a dialogue on the afterlives of
pastoral. It is inspired by the recent pastoral turn, by the questioning title
of Alpers’s book, and by Patterson’s focus on the pastoral as literature in
action. As Alpers reminds us, the pleasures of nymphs and shepherds and
their herds are only ever the vehicle for a quite different, darker discourse:
“the very notion of pastoral . . . represents a fantasy that is
dissipated by the recognition of political and social realities” (24).
In this spirit, the organizers seek participants from a wide
range of fields, including literature, the performing arts, music and other
forms of cultural discourse that engage with the core of this ancient
tradition.
For more information please visit: http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=204907&pid=177854
