description & set texts
A recent effort redraw the boundaries of literary studies and cultural studies in the age of environmental crisis, ecocriticsm seeks to rethink the human place in nature, positing a new category, space/place/environment, as a viable perspective on how human culture is connected to the physical world, hence how culture affects nature and how it is affected by it. This course will be concerned with discourses on places and spaces in a selection of American and Hungarian texts, teasing out how the concepts of Eden, wilderness, land, nature, pastoralism, country and city, apocalypse and pollution, public and private space, have changed over time in the respective local/national culture/literature. Drawing on these texts, we will also attempt to read them comparatively, in a cross-cultural perspective, seeking to tie our literary/cultural analyses to a green moral and political agenda.
Objectives of the course: to familiarize students with basic issues of ecocriticism, including the scope of the discourse and its terminology, to sensitize them to the politics of environmentalism, nature preservation, nature writing vis-à-vis ecocriticism, to enlarge their vocabulary, oral and writing skills about green agendas.
Requirements:
- activity in class discussions
- individual oral presentations
- endterm essay: BA students: 6 pp, MA students: 10-12 pp (both double spaced, academic essay with footnotes, bibliobraphy, MLA formatting)
- short in-class response papers
Assessment: oral performance: 50% + essay 50%
Readings: reader uploaded
Syllabus with Readings and Presentation
2/13 Intro, orientation
2/20 Land, landcape and ideology/1
David Lowenthal, “European Landscapes as National Symbols” (Geography and National Identity)
2/27 Land, landcape and ideology/2
S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, “The Narrative Structures: The Cultural Codes of a Landscape Aesthetic” (Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb):
3/6 Public spaces and cultural codes/1
Gábor Gyáni, “User Strategies” (Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-siècle Budapest):
3/13 Public spaces and cultural codes/2
Alison Byerly, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System” (Ecocriticism Reader)
3/20 Reinventing (American) nature
Kenneth R. Olwig, “Reinventing Common Nature Yosemite and Mount Rushmore—A Meandering Tale of Double Nature” (Uncommon Ground):
3/27 Nature and gender
Kate Soper, “The Idea of Nature” (Green Studies Reader)
Kate Soper , “Naturalized Woman and Feminized Nature”(Green Studies Reader)
Anette Kolodny, “Unearthing Herstory” (Ecocriticism Reader)
4/10 Ecocriticsm as intellectual activity and political practice/1
William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism” (Ecocriticism Reader)
Richard White Are You and Environmentalist or Do You Work for Living? (Ecocriticism Reader)
4/17 Ecological utopia: a classic
Ernest Callanbach, Ecotopia, 1974
4/24 Humans, animals and cyborgs
Dona Haraway, Manifesto for Cyborgs OR Octavia Butler, ’Bloodchild’
5/15 A NEW WE
film screening and discussion
Essay deadline: announced later
Useful links:
David Attenborough, The Truth About Climate Change
Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JmrmwIyhAE
Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK47Pnx46rM
How Many People Can Live on Earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN06tLRE4WE
AFTERMATH Population Zero Full
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUqHECc5rPo
Without Warning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9xMTA7qhZM
Preview of Davis Guggenheim’s The Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore’s campaign to educate citizens about global warming)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu6SE5TYrCM
download documentary:
http://documentarylovers.com/film/al-gore-an-inconvenient-truth/
Annie Leonard
The Story of Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
The Story of Bottled Water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSOM0
The Story of Solutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpkRvc-sOKk