Environmental Humanities
environmental humanities
This course explores ways that writers and artists understand and represent their environments. Explore as many different artistic and literary forms as possible, we’ll pay particular attention to the ways that these different forms address changing ecological dynamics resulting from human activity, especially issues of environmental ethics and justice that arise from the unequal global distribution of environmental crises. We will consider how these trends and issues influence our own engagements with and understandings of the more-than-human world. Classwork will culminate in a research paper and a student-designed creative project focused on ecological concerns that we tackle in the class.
environment and literature
In this course, we will consider how literary representations of environment influence our feelings towards and understandings of the more-than-human world. We will investigate the extent that literary, artistic, and cultural forms shape ways that people make sense of and relate to nature and the environment. We will identify strategies by which poets, filmmakers, and fiction and nonfiction writers have addressed environmental questions. Classwork will culminate in a student-designed project that explores issues of environment, culture, and art that we will explore throughout the semester.
film adaptation: ecological sci-fi
This course explores relationships between literature and movies by investigating how filmmakers present literary forms such as short stories, plays, novels, and comics. In particular we will consider these questions of adaptation through the lens of ecological science fiction: narratives that explore questions of ecological through a speculative lens. We will take an expanded approach to questions about adaptation, seeing film as not simply based on literary antecedents but as an art form which draws on other forms of art. We will consider the complex relations between copy and original, moving beyond the basic concerns of fidelity (“good” or “bad” adaptations). Our texts will be diverse, moving across historical periods, cultural contexts, and geographical spaces. In the end, our goal will be to think about creative and critical possibilities that arise in these intertextual situations.