School of Arts & Sciences

2024-20245 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts

The Nature of Representation

The Nature of Representation asks how our understandings of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that language is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages allows us to tell stories that disrupt the violence of Man.

Timothy Morton, "The War Against the Holy Spirit of Life: Some Countermeasures."
September 12, 4:30 p.m. | Humanities Commons

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Professor of English at Rice University. Both an acclaimed specialist in British Romantic poetics and a leading figure in the philosophical movement called speculative realism or object-oriented ontology, Morton’s many books include The Ecological Thought, Hyperobjects, Realist Magic, and Becoming Ecological, and their work has involved collaboration with figures far outside of academia, including Björk. Their most recent book is Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology.

Hosted by the Department of English.

Dept. of English Writers Series

Garth Greenwell

Wednesday, September 25, 6 p.m.

Tyler Haynes Commons, Room 305

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over 50 publications in nine countries, and is being translated into 14 languages. 

Humanities Center

2024-2025: How (And Why) Do We Represent Nature?

This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political and aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, advertising campaigns. This question asks how environments — and often their relations to human concerns — are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments.