Ithaca College

Dana Professor Michael Twomey of the Department of English is offering an advanced course this semester in literature and environmental literary criticism, also called "ecocriticism."  The course is open to all students who have taken at least three courses in the humanities.  The title of the course is "Environmental Criticism:  Green Reading."

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.

Further information about the course can be found here, on the webpage of the Department of English.