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Instructors: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Monika Class
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.410
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: ELC 410
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
All participants of this online course are kindly asked to use LMS moodle: https://lms.uni-mainz.de/moodle/login/index.php
Contents:
From the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1996):
"What then is ecocriticism? [it] is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment […]. Ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.
Ecocritics and theorists ask questions like the following: How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in [narratives]? Are the values expressed in [the literary text] consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? […] In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category? Do men write about nature differently than women do? In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind's relationship to the natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture? What bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is science itself open to literary analysis? What cross-fertilization is possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?
[…] [e]cological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of languages and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human." (xviii-xix)
The asynchronous online seminar aims to familiarise students with some basic theories in ecocriticism. It will introduce the field, illustrate concepts, and trace literary configurations of nature in poetry written in English from the Romantic period to the present.
Recommended reading list:
- Bly, Robert. News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1995 (1980). Print
- Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader : Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens ; London: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Print.
Digital teaching:
The sessions will be held asynchronously in accordance with the guidelines for this semester (Corona Plan I 3 March 2022).
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