Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope

This event has already occurred, but you can watch the recording below. 

Join us for a conversation about the role of story systems called fantasy and myth in reshaping how we should live at the time when human supremacy threatens all of the planet’s living systems. Hosted by Brian Attebery and Tereza Dědinová, co-editors of Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene, the panel will introduce the book and its central questions. Panelists John Rieder, Lindsay Burton, Alexander Popov, and Caryl Lesuma will reflect on teaching about the Anthropocene with fantasy books and media and consider a host of wider questions. How can fantasy and myth mobilize resistance to petrochemical Ragnarok? How can they serve as vehicles for anticipatory imagination that articulates alternatives to the Capitalocene? How can they point a way to restoring the connection with the natural rather than the supernatural? Ultimately, how can fantasy and myth help us reimagine ourselves as a ecocentric, ecological civilization? We look forward to you joining this conversation. 

Scholar and editor Brian Attebery has won multiple awards for his work on fantasy and science fiction, mostly recently the World Fantasy Award for his longtime editorship of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. In 2019 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in fantasy at the University of Glasgow. One of his projects there was helping to launch a scholarly series from Bloomsbury Academic, Perspectives on Fantasy, which he edits along with Dimitra Fimi and Matthew Sanger. He is the author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, and co-editor with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler of the Norton Book of Science Fiction. As editor of Le Guin’s work for the Library of America he is currently working on a volume of her short fiction. His book Fantasy in the World: How Does It Mean and What Does It Do? is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2022.

Tereza Dědinová is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where she teaches theory and history of fantastic literature and Czech literature. She has written a monograph (2015) and edited three titles focusing on various aspects of fantastic literature. She has published articles devoted to the fantastic from the cognitive and ecocritical perspective, the representation of the actual world in fantasy, and the Czech fantastika. Her most recent project is a co-edited volume entitled Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future (2021).