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Brown Bag Biography with John Zuern

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The Center for Biographical Research presents: / “Life Narrative at the Terminus: Glacier Memoirs and Planetary Relationality”/ John Zuern, Department of English and Co-editor for the Center for Biographical Research, University of ��ɫ������վʻi, ����ԴDz� / This talk examines the American glaciologist M Jackson’s While Glaciers Slept: Being Human in a Time of Climate Change and The Secret Lives of Glaciers; the British glaciologist Jemma Wadham’s Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity; and the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water, all of which employ autobiographical discourse to convey the enormity of the climate crisis as it is manifested in the rapidly accelerating loss of Earth’s glacial ice. I suggest that these texts demonstrate how the distinctive truth claims, temporal modalities, subject-positioning strategies, and affective appeals of life narrative provide a particularly supple hermeneutic schema in which an understanding of the moral ramifications of humans’ mutually dependent relationships with more-than-human nature—what Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru have described as ‘a planetary ethics of relationality’—might be fostered. / John David Zuern is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of ��ɫ������վʻi at ����ԴDz� (��ɫ������վM) and the current Department Chair. He is a co-editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and a co-editor of the Bloomsbury series New Directions in Life Narrative. / 3/27/25 / Kuykendall 410 / 12PM to 1:15PM HST

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research , Mānoa Campus

More Information
8582753177, jjkq@hawaii.edu