Course Description

This course explores how literature and film inform the ways we understand, imagine, and relate to the surrounding world. How might we change our relation to place, space, feeling, and thought in relationship to the local and global environment? We will travel, together, through several examples of how the countryside, wilderness, and the city have been depicted historically in literature and film, as well as ways in which we now enter the surrounding world via climate concerns, posthumanism, and digital culture.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate an awareness of the function of literary representation as both shaped by concrete situations and shaping responses to such situations.
2. Analytically compare different conventions and strategies in the representation of place in literature and explain their significance in relation to environmental values.
3. Distinguish between different concepts and representations of the environment in relation to material and imaginary uses of places.
4. Identify key issues in eco-criticism and trace their histories across different cultural traditions.
5. Recognize distinct imaginary and institutional environments constituted by literature and engage in arguments about their relevance to society.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)