Wither Goest Thou, Literature? Speculative Fiction and the Future of Novels

主 讲 人：Simon C. Estok

讲座时间：2025年6月17日 9：30-11：00

讲座地点：综合楼354

主讲人简介:

Dr. Simon C. Estok is a professor and Senior Fellow of South Korea’s oldest university, Sungkyunkwan University (成均館大學校, established 1398). He is editor of the A&HCI-listed journal Neohelicon: Acta comparationis litterarum universarum and is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Art. Estok held China’s prestigious East Scholar Award (东方学者) from 2015 to 2018, has received the National Research Foundation of Korea Writing in the Humanities Program book award twice, and is best known for his theory of ecophobia, which has been profoundly influential, spawning an entirely new discipline—ecogothic studies—and several new journals. Estok began formulating the term “ecophobia” in his doctoral thesis, introduced the term to the ecocritical community in 2009, and then published his masterful book The Ecophobia Hypothesis through Routledge in 2018. Estok is not only an influential ecocritic but a pioneering Shakespearean. He was the first person to study “ecocritical Shakespeares,” against considerable resistance—now it is a thriving industry all its own. His work is wide-ranging. He has over a hundred articles published, 70 in A&HCI journals (including PMLA), 26 book chapters, and 9 books, notably Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (2011), East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader (2013), and The Ecophobia Hypothesis (2018). His most recent book is entitled Slime: An Elemental Imaginary, published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a book entitled The Agony of Water in an Age of Climate Change, contracted as the inaugural book in the Bloomsbury Blue Humanities series and forthcoming in March 2026.

内容简介：

One of the things elemental to the speculative fiction of a writer such as Kim Stanley Robinson is also elemental in speculative realism—namely, a fundamental rejection of anthropocentrism. In terms of literature, there are deep consequences to this rejection. Even the metaphors that we use to describe the abstract delusional self-importance of the concept that anthropocentrism embodies reveals problems—the idea that human beings are central to everything in the universe, are at the pinnacle of evolution, and are separate from and above nature . . . three very clear spatial metaphors in radical conflict with each other: central to, at the top of, outside of and above—we can’t be at all three places at once, obviously.