Literature And Environment Pdf

[Daisy Hughlett]

Thisminor is designed for undergraduate students who wish to enhance their major in another field with intensive study of literature in its relationship to the natural environment, while improving their skills in reading, writing, creative and critical thinking, and analysis of complex situations in an ethical frame. The minor examines how different cultural forms (for example, fiction, journalism, poetry, film, design, and other arts) represent environmental issues, including biodiversity, animal studies, wilderness, food, urban ecologies, postcolonial ecologies, environmental justice, and climate change.

To enter the minor, students must be in good academic standing (2.0 grade-point average) and must have successfully completed Writing II. For further information, please contact the departmental Undergraduate Advising Offices.

Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.

The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Bentez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphal Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.

How is it that the natural world has seemed to writers across time as both comforting and terrifying, a pastoral refuge or a dark threat? How have literary myths of a "green world" spurred us to think about what precisely separates "the human" from other worlds around us? Are humans a part of nature or an exception to it? How do our ideas about nature impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules and rights, on humans, nonhumans, and the places we cross paths, sometimes without knowing it? Tracking these questions through literary forms ranging from Edenic stories and origin myths to Shakespearean drama, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and science fiction, students in this course will unearth the unexamined grounds of "green" thought as it appears in literary environments (as well as film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students an introduction to the "environmental humanities" and a deep dive into the storied concept of "nature," while offering an unusual and broad background on classic literary themes of belonging, justice/ethics, freedom, wilderness, and the everyday.

Gain familiarity with key terms and concepts in the emerging interdisciplinary area of the environmental humanities.

Seek to discover the blindspots and purposes of a given text's version of what is "natural."

Learn to balance the study of rhetoric in literary texts with the study of natural environments in a variety of contexts.

Work individually and in groups to develop college-level close readings of literary texts, with attention to the ways language, literature, and aesthetic production shape ideas about nature.

Develop college-level literary arguments supported by textual evidence. Write college-level analytical papers, unfolding claims in clear, well-structured prose.

ENGL 444 - Literature and Environment(3 units)

Prerequisites: GE Foundation, one or more Explorations courses, and upper-division standing. Students must have scored 11 or higher on the GWAR Placement Examination or completed the necessary portfolio course that is a prerequisite for a GWAR Writing Intensive Capstone.

Literature that focuses on the relationship between humans and the environment. Emphasis on how environmental texts represent nature, raise awareness of ecological issues, and encourage social change. Service learning requirement connects environmental literature with activism and community involvement.

Letter grade only(A-F)

The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) seeks to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. Our vision is an inclusive community whose members are committed to environmental research, education, literature, art and service, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability. ASLE was founded in 1992 by a group of scholars and writers interested in exploring the meanings of the natural environment and the complexities of human relationships with each other, and with the more-than-human world, and to deepening the impact of these explorations both within and beyond the classroom. While ecocritical teaching and scholarship developed in literary and cultural studies, our members include writers and educators who also work in interdisciplinary fields such as ecology, conservation biology, environmental history, environmental philosophy, and environmental law. (Text from ASLE)

ASLE offers resources for researchers, students, and teachers, and features various calls for papers as well as grants. The association also hosts a biennal conference and other symposia, and is responsible for the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Our 2024 Environmental Literature Institute will center around a three-day mini paddling expedition on the Connecticut River. We will explore the watershed and its complexities in our place-based teaching and learning. Our time on the river will provide opportunities to explore how to bring environmental pedagogy into the classroom. You will engage in deep conversation and connection with the place itself and with those who know it. You do not need to be an experienced paddler to participate in this program.

Founded in 2006, ALECC is a Canadian association for the study of environment and culture that brings together artistic, activist, and academic communities. We are an interdisciplinary organization whose members are involved in cultural, social, ethical, political, historical, and philosophical analysis, community engagement, social and political change, creative writing, storytelling, and visual, sound, and performative arts.

As an association, our approach to the environmental humanities is inclusive, transnational, and multilingual. We engage with interconnected areas such as Indigenous knowledge, decolonization, critical race studies, animal studies, gender, sexuality, disability, and education. We welcome the participation of individuals from any related scholarly, activist, or artistic communities, and we aim to facilitate collaboration across life experiences and career stages.

ALECC supports its members through an array of volunteer-driven initiatives. We organize a biennial conference, publish our journal The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, maintain an active membership and listserv run our website, and award the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. We regularly fund member-organized local and regional events, such as poetry readings; and we build and maintain connections with other environmental and cultural organizations. Graduate students play leadership roles in ALECC and are supported with conference travel funding when possible.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Emily Rau is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the Editor of the Willa Cather Archive. She received her MA from Lehigh University and her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her dissertation, "Jumping the Tracks: The Railroad in American Literature," explored the intervention of the transcontinental railroad in American literature as it impacted and transformed conceptions of space, place, race, class, identity, and community.

This is a field immersion course in literature and the environment taking place at Cedar Point Biological Station, near Ogallala, Nebraska. In this course, we will immerse ourselves into literature of the Great Plains spanning the past century. Our syllabus prioritizes the work of Indigenous authors, weaving those texts together with works by canonical writers from a settler colonial context in order to offer a more comprehensive perspective on the stories of the Great Plains. This course will closely explore the complex history of the region, while looking towards potential methods for reconciliation and for cultivating a responsible relationship with the space we inhabit.

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