LAND-SIG: PALA special interest group on the stylistics of landscape, space and place
PALA members who are interested in participating in a new PALA special interest group on the stylistics of landscape, space and place (broadly conceived, and incorporating related concepts such as setting, environment, eco-stylistics, eco-poetics etc.) are reminded to please get in touch with Ernestine Lahey (e.lahey@roac.nl), who is coordinating the establishment of the SIG.
Although the specific aims of the SIG can be determined by the SIG members themselves once a base membership is established, the central idea behind the SIG is to provide a forum for stylisticians to contribute more actively to the dialogue about landscape and environment which is currently ongoing within other humanities disciplines (see for instance the AHRC's Landscape and Environment programme: http://www.landscape.ac.uk/). Stylistics' contribution to this dialogue may take the form of an eco-stylistic/eco-poetic scholarly activism (as proposed by both Andrew Goatly and Katie Wales at the PALA 2010 conference in Genoa), but environmental activism is not the only, nor even the central goal of the SIG, which should incorporate a wide range of concerns, including stylistic analyses which focus on the following features, forms and genres: travel writing/tourism discourse (including tourist narratives and tourism advertising/promotion), figurative/metaphorical aspects of landscape and setting; world-building strategies in landscape description; landscape, place and belonging (e.g. as in post-colonial literatures); the landscapes of science fiction; the landscapes of drama and performance; the stylistics of specific places (some examples from the PALA 2010 conference include Italy, Interlaken, Birmingham, and the Arctic); the style of specific writers in their representations of landscape, space and place (e.g. again from papers at PALA Genoa: Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence); the stylistics of setting in specific genres (e.g. British crime fiction); the style of landscape description in specific works (e.g. Pictures from Italy). This list is suggestive rather than exhaustive and other concerns and approaches which fit into the board aim of the SIG would be most welcome.
Posted 5th August 2010