Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) is the principal professional association for American and international scholars of ecocriticism. It was founded in 1992 at a special session of the Western Literature Association conference in Reno, Nevada for the purpose of "sharing of facts, ideas, and texts concerning the study of literature and the environment."[1] The current president of ASLE is Paul Outka of the University of Kansas. The next conference will be held May 28 - June 1, 2013, at University of North Texas, Denton, TX.

The association hosts a biennial conference and publishes an official journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) —in which the most current scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can often be found.

ASLE now has branches or related organisations: ASLE-UKI (UK and Ireland); ASLE-Japan; ASLE-India, ASLE-Korea, and ASLE-Taiwan. Other affiliates have altered the acronym to better reflect the scope of ecocriticism. They include ALECC (Canada), EASLCE (Europe) and ASLEC-ANZ (Australia and New Zealand). ASLE-UKI publishes the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, ALECC publishes the 'Journal of Ecocriticism' (JoE) under the online Open Journal system http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe; and ASLEC-ANZ publishes 'AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology', through the online Open Journal system. It is sponsored by National Library of Australia, http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-anz.

In India, there are two ASLE affiliates, ASLE-India, and OSLE-India. On the 27th of May, 2006, ASLE-India was renamed OSLE-India (organisation for Studies in Literature and Environment-India). A group in Pondicherry took up the name ASLE-India and it produces a newsletter from Pondicherry University. OSLE-India (Organisation for Studies in Literature and Environment-India) publishes an online newsletter and a journal in print Indian Journal of Ecocriticism, and annually conducts an International Conference in India.The current president of OSLE-India is Nirmal Selvamony of Central University of Tamil Nadu and the Vice President is Suresh Frederick of Bishop Heber College, India. OSLE-India is a forum for promoting ecocriticism, especially in India and also in other Asian countries. Today \'ecocriticism\' has come to mean not only \'the application of ecology and ecological principles to the study of literature,\' but also the theoretical approach to the interrelational web of natural, cultural and supernatural phenomena.

OSLE-India owes its origin to a postgraduate ecocritical course (now called, \'ecoliterature\'), which the Department of English, Madras Christian College, Chennai, has been offering for the past twenty years, under the rubric of tinai studies. With a view to strengthening this course, the department conducted an international conference on ecocriticism in collaboration with the Indian Association for Studies in Contemporary Literature (IASCL), and the World Association for Studies in Literatures in English (WASLE) on the 20th and 21st of December, 2004, in Chennai. This conference showed the growing interest and involvement in ecocriticism in the Indian academy. In order to bring these scholars together, an informal forum called ASLE-India was formed on 15 January 2005, leading to the official establishment of the two separate Indian ecocritical associations.

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