美国文学专家Patrick Murphy教授讲座：Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Rhetorical Strategies in Climate change

       美国文学专家Patrick Murphy教授讲座

题  目：Getting the Story Straight: Narrative and Rhetorical Strategies in Climate change

时  间：2010年5月13日下午3:00

地  点：虹口校区文学研究院会议室（科研大楼511室）

主办单位：文学研究院、英美文学研究中心

Popular Science and Fiction

讲座提要：

Climate change provides an immediately useful and immensely valuable topic for language and literature teaching. Today, in both the United States and China, as evidenced by topics discussed during Secretary Clinton's first visit as a representative of the Obama Administration and subsequent bilateral discussions between Presidents Obama and Hu Jin Tao, addressing climate change has been publicly recognized at the highest government levels as a pressing concern calling for coordinated effort. Further, it has been called the key challenge of the twenty-first century.

In this talk I will discuss the narrative and rhetorical strategies that are employed in a range of novels and popular science books. Examples will include works from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US. Some of these texts are future oriented, while others focus on climate history and the daily events of the present and immediate past. Some have as their primary strategy the intellectual edification of the audience while entertaining them in ways typical of formulaic literary and popular nonfiction genres. Some, instead, pursue an emotive-affective response from readers in order to incite them to action. Rhetorically structured works frequently rely on extensive and varied forms of embedded narratives for distinct purposes. Meanwhile, the novels often contain extended rhetorical passages, often provided as explanations or speeches. I will conclude by considering the growing convergence of the information components of both types of works and the types of audience impacts different strategies are likely to produce.

主讲人简介：

Patrick Murphy教授执教于美国University of Central Florida大学英语系，《英美文学研究论丛》外籍编委。他的研究领域包括自然文学（nature-oriented Literature）、美国当代多元文化文学（Contemporary Multicultural American Literature）、亚裔美国文学和亚裔文学对比研究（Comparative Asian American and Asian Literatures）、现代美国诗歌（Modern American Poetry）、生态批评（Ecocriticism）、科幻小说（science fiction）、身体化主体身份（bodied subjecthood and identities）、巴赫金对话理论（Bakhtinian dialogics）。

出版的著作有：

Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies, Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.

Farther Afield in the Study of Nature Oriented Literature, University Press of Virginia, 2000.

A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder, Oregon State University Press, 2000.

Literature, Nature, and Other:  Ecofeminist Critiques, State University of New York Press, 1995.

   Understanding Gary Snyder, University of South Carolina Press, 1992.