Description: Panelists explore a variety of topics pertaining to the literary imagination of today’s plastic crisis: the earliest uses of the term plastic in nineteenth-century industrial journals; the representations of plastic-related labor in China; the metaphoric implications of plastic’s presence in our food systems; the climate of consumption in contemporary poetry; the representations of a subject tacitly implicated in the making of the Plasticene.

Speakers

Tom Hertweck, U of Nevada, Reno

Jessica Holmes, U of Washington, Seattle

Rebecca Raitses, Graduate Center, City U of New York

Adam Rosenthal, Texas A&M U, College Station

Xingyue Zhou, Southern U of Science and Technology, China

Presider

Margarita Smagina, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon