Enunciating the End

Thursday, March 1

Registration/Meet and Greet—6:30pm

Graduate Lounge – LB 681

 

Evening Reception—8:00pm

Irish Embassy Pub and Grill – 1234 Rue Bishop

 

Friday, March 2

Registration and Breakfast                                                                                                                                   

8:30-9:30am

Graduate Lounge – LB 681

 

All panels held in Room LB 646

 

Panel 1—9:30-10:45am

Apocalypse City: Building the discourse of 19^th century urban and domestic landscapes

Chair: Zara Ahmed

Adrian Versteegh (NYU)

Revelation without Hope: Apocalyptic Temporality and Topography in James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night

James Baltrum (Northern Illinois)

New York Domesti-City: Rethinking Gender Roles and the Home as Industrial Space

Lise Gaston (Concordia)

Natural and Unnatural Endings in Matineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy

 

Panel 2—11:00-12:15pm                                   

Alternative Revelations: Ephemeral re-framings of hetero-normative histories

Chair: Michael Belcher

Kirsten Shute (Brock)

Aftershocks of Surrealism:Leonora Carrington’s Hearing Trumpet as Apocalyptic Collage

Jessi MacEachern (Independent)

Framed Excursus: Some Parts Larger and Some Parts Smaller

Fazeela Jiwa (Concordia)

Strategic Interventions: Fictocriticism as Feminist Writing Beyond Autoethnography

 

Catered Lunch—12:15-1:00pm                                                                                                                                                               

Faculty Lounge – LB 671.05

 

Panel 3—1:00-2:15pm

Topaic Tropes: Mobilizing the language of liminality

Chair: Shannon Tien

Lauren Davine (Ryerson)

Teenage Dystopia: Apocalypse and Fantasy in Donnie Darko and Daydream Nation

Simon Orpana (McMaster)

The Zombie Imaginary: Risk Management, Neoliberalism and Utopia in The Walking Dead and Disaster Discourse

Andrew Wenaus (Western)

The Twilight of Information Illiteracy: Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric and Asemic Cyberpunk

 

Panel 4—2:30-3:45pm

Signs of Ends to Come: Rethinking the post-apocalyptic narrative

Chair: Sarah Livesey

Virginia Konchan (UIC)

What Apocalypse: End-Time Narratives and the Structure of the Sign

Dock Currie (Western)

Liquid Materiality: Water and Apocalypse in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle

Chanda Phelan (Ohio State)

Transforming the End

 

Keynote Address—4:15-5:30pm – H 435                                                                                                                                  

Chair: Dr. Jonathan Sachs

Dr. Christopher Keep (Western)

H.G. Wells and the End of the Body

 

Wine and Cheese Reception—5:30-7:30pm

GSA Lounge – 2030 Rue Mackay

 

Saturday, March 3

Registration and Breakfast—9:00-10:00am

Graduate Lounge – LB 681

 

All Saturday panels held in Room LB 646

 

Panel 5—10:00-11:30am

Immaterial Book Ends: Transformative media and the future of print

Chair: Lise Gaston

Aaron Donachuk (Toronto)

Fate or Fantasy?: Re-Reading “The End of Books”

Jeff Miller (Concordia)

“Printed in Canada on Canadian Paper by mindless acid freaks”: Rochdale College, Coach House Press, and the Early 1970s Utopianism of The Canada Whole Earth Almanac

Shannon Tien (Concordia)

Residual Platforms: The Role of Paper in Contemporary News Culture

Alex Christie (Loyola)

Humanities at the End: Apocalypse and the Digital Archive

 

Panel 6—11:45-1:00pm

Re-playing the End Game: Reconstructing the future through ruptures in the past

Chair: Fazeela Jiwa

Matthew Fledderjohann (DePaul)

Countering Counter-Apocalypse with Post-Apocalypse: Reconciling Endgame’s End

David B. Huebert (Independent)

Trying Not to Understand Endgame: Art and the Holocaust in Adorno’s Reading of Beckett

Dragos Moraru (Laval)

Histopias: “Ruptures” and Time’s Boomerang in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

 

Catered Lunch—1:00-2:00pm

Faculty Lounge – LB 671.05

 

Panel 7—2:00-3:15pm

Drawing Out the End: Postmodern Representations of Violence

Chair: Kathryn Pobjoy

Mark Diachyshyn (Dalhousie)

“Amongst Horrors Must I Dwell”: Tales of the Black Freighter, Eschatological Reverberations and the Structure of Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen

Whitney Porter (Macaulay at CUNY Baruch)

The (Postmodern) World’s Not Black and White: the Downfall of Retributive Justice in V for Vendetta

Anna Peppard (York)

Loosing Bets: Marvel Comics’ Deadpool and Impossible Dream of Death

 

Roundtable—3:45-5:00pm – H 407

Chair: Dr. Brooke Cameron

Comparative Apocalypses: A Discussion with Drs. Marcus Boon (Cornell), Michael Van Dussen (McGill), and Lorenzo DiTommaso (Concordia)

 

Sixth Annual Year-End Graduate Reading—8:00pm

Café l’Artère – 7000 Avenue du Parc (Parc Metro)

Readings by Concordia Creative Writing Graduate Students

Hosted by Jon Paul Fiorentino

The calendar used by the ancient Mayan civilisation does not predict the end of the world in December 2012 as some believe, according to experts.

A new reading of a Mayan tablet mentioning the 2012 date suggests that it refers to the end of an era in the calendar, and not an apocalypse.

The date was “a reflection of the day of creation”, Mayan codes researcher Sven Gronemeyer told AP.

The day also marked the return of a Mayan god, Mr Gronemeyer added.

Bolon Yokte, the god of creation and war, was expected to return, according to Mr Gronemeyer’s reading of a Mayan text carved into stone 1,300 years ago.

The date marks the end of one of the periods of roughly 400 years into which the Mayan calendar is divided.

Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropological History has also tried to counter speculation that the Mayans predicted a catastrophic event for 2012.

Only two out of 15,000 registered Mayan texts mention the date 2012, according to the Institute, and no Mayan text predicts the end of the world.

“There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy,” Erik Velasquez, etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Reuters.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16000331

Reblogging from original post here. By Chandra Phelan. 

Most major religions, going back thousands of years, tell stories about the End of the World. And post-apocalyptic fiction is perennially popular. So why, in the last twenty years, has the apocalypse ceased to matter?

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

It’s not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It’s the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we’d get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that’s to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war’s popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I’ve broken up the “human made disaster” into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns’ total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there’s a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

That’s an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It’s not that the moment of destruction is boring; it’s that it doesn’t even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don’t bother to explain what happened at all.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn’t matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn’t mean the story’s finished; much of the time, it’s only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they’re about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

When the survivors wander around, they’re looking at a burned-out shell of a world, but it’s still a clean slate. A clean slate full of radiation and cannibals, maybe, but still. I think everyone’s had that feeling of wanting to just heave everything out the window and start over. That’s what is at the heart of apocalypse stories: the opportunity to rebuild the world in a radically different way.

During the pilgrimage through the wasteland, the survivors – and the readers – are left feeling ostracized from reality. The characters are probably more concerned with where their next meal is coming from, but the reader sees how they are cut loose from the anchors that previously protected us from being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence. The only way to fix it is to find new ways of looking, new patterns to create meaning in the new world.

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

This is hardly the final word; more a collection of observations and theories. I won’t claim any more than that, because if there’s one thing I learned while researching apocalypses, it’s just how much humans like to see patterns in things – and that when patterns start getting too neat, you’ve done something wrong. There are still some things about the chart I don’t understand – the three points where the natural apocalypse overtakes the human apocalypse, for example – and it doesn’t take into account the effect that movies or television had on books. As will any discussion of a large genre, there are some necessary overgeneralizations. But it’s a starting point – have at it.

Chanda Phelan just graduated from Pomona College, where she completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. You can read her blog at phnuggle.wordpress.com.

Chart by Stephanie Fox!

If you needed any more proof that the age of dead-tree books is over take a look at these alarming style changes at Ikea: the furniture manufacturer’s iconic BILLY bookcase – the bookcase that everyone put together when they got their first apartment and, inevitably, pounded the nails wrong into – is becoming deeper and more of a curio cabinet. Why? Because Ikea is noticing that customers no longer buy them for books

(Via 1001 Books To Read Before You Die.)

With the launch of the Kindle Fire tomorrow, John Biggs over at TechCrunch thought it would be fun to write a little bit sci-fi and imagine what the publishing market will look like in the next ten or so years.

Here are his predictions and more at the link.

2013 – EBook sales surpass all other book sales, even used books. EMagazines begin cutting into paper magazine sales.
2014 – Publishers begin “subsidized” e-reader trials. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers will attempt to create hardware lockins for their wares. They will fail.
2015 – The death of the Mom and Pops. Smaller book stores will use the real estate to sell coffee and Wi-Fi. Collectable bookstores will still exist in the margins.
2016 – Lifestyle magazines as well as most popular Conde Nast titles will go tablet-only.
2018 – The last Barnes & Noble store converts to a cafe and digital access point.
2019 – B&N and Amazon’s publishing arms – including self-pub – will dwarf all other publishing.
2019 – The great culling of the publishers. Smaller houses may survive but not many of them. The giants like Random House and Penguin will calve their smaller houses into e-only ventures. The last of the “publisher subsidized” tablet devices will falter.
2020 – Nearly every middle school to college student will have an e-reader. Textbooks will slowly disappear.
2023 – Epaper will make ereaders as thin as a few sheets of paper.
2025 – The transition is complete even in most of the developing world. The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.

(Via TechCrunch.)