Michael Twomey, Dana Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, will offer an upper-level English course in the spring of 2016 entitled "Environmental Criticism: Green Reading." The class is open to any student who has taken at least three other courses in the humanities.
"Green Reading" examines literary texts written in different historical periods and in different cultures in order to investigate representations of the relationship between human beings and elements of the natural world. In order to frame this investigation, the course will also incorporate critical and theoretical texts written by late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ecocritics.
A full description of the course appears below:
ENGL 39001-01 Environmental Criticism: Green Reading (HU LA)
CRN 43797
3 credits
INSTRUCTOR: Michael Twomey, Muller 329, Ext. 4-3564, twomey@ithaca.edu
Enrollment: 20.
Prerequisite: Three courses in the Humanities.
Course description: What do literature and the environment have to do with each other? Usually we read literature for what it tells us about human characters and situations. Instead, this course explores the representation of the non-human in literature and what it reveals about our often unconscious, culturally-constructed views of the ecosystems outside our skin. We will do this through “green reading,” an ecologically informed mode of literary criticism formally known as environmental criticism or ecocriticism. In the words of ecocritic Glen Love, green reading reminds us that “the enveloping natural world is a part of the subject on the printed page before us, and even when it is not, it remains a given, part of the interpretive context.” In our earth-centered approach to literary study, we will investigate relationships between humans and non-humans in the natural world—landscapes, plants, animals—as they are expressed in literature and in ecocriticism, and we will reconsider the implications of the self-referential attitude toward the non-human that ecocritics label anthropocentrism. Literary texts will be drawn from ancient to modern times; we will also read selections from ecocritics such as Timothy Clark, Greg Garrard, Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant, Simon Schama, and Louise Westling.
Course format and style: Some lecturing, lots of discussion, student-directed projects, environmental encounters.
Course requirements: Regular attendance and participation in class discussions, two short essays, environmental journal, in-class exercises and presentations, final paper. In this courser it is essential to do the reading when it is assigned.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/2015112921235341