Disasters & Catastrophes (2018)
Enlightenment specialists and non-specialists alike are familiar with the disaster that engulfed Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and equally with Voltaire’s famous answer to the catastrophe in his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster and in the form of the novel Candide. But what was the larger climate of opinion during the Age of Enlightenment concerning the nature of providence, the meaning of disasters, and the appropriate human response to such events? This fifth meeting of the Enlightenment Group considered a wide range of answers to such questions.
Program
9:00 am – 9h30 Coffee/tea
9: 30 am Opening Remarks, Dean of Arts
9-45 am-10:45 am Session 1: The framing of disasters
Cindy Ermus (University of Lethbridge): “Understandings of Disaster and the Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century”
David Clemis (Mount Royal University): “The English Gin Craze: the Cultural Construction of a Social Disaster”
10:45-11 am Coffee break
11-12:30 pm Session 2: Representations of disasters and catastrophes
Jeffrey M. Suderman (Mount Royal University): “Awful signs and providences: British fast-day sermons in the aftermath of the Lisbon Earthquake.”
Antoine Eche (Mount Royal University): “Representations of earthquakes in travel writing: the example of Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages”
Anthony Wall (University of Calgary): “Hubert Robert and his Poetics of Crisis”
12:30-1:45 pm Lunch break
1:45-2:45 pm Session 3: Comparative approaches
Glen Ryland (Mount Royal University): “The Black Legend: Shaping a Polemical Genre for European Conflicts”
Martin Wagner (University of Calgary): “No More Catastrophes?: On Amitav Ghosh’s Critique of Literary Realism”
2:45 pm- 3pm Coffee break
3-4 pm Plenary session
Mark Molesky (Seton Hall University): “Apocalypse in the Age of Science & Reason: The Lisbon Earthquake Disaster of 1755”