ENG5049-0001 – Spring 2027 – Sperling

This course will focus on the field of ecotheory, from ecocriticism and literary studies in the 1980s and '90s (primarily in a US context) into a more contemporary and broader theoretical mode. We will also look to specific science and speculative fiction, media, and the arts that operate as themselves ecotheoretical texts of imaginative, speculative ecologies. Though the course does begin with readings on other core ideas in ecocriticism about “nature” and “environment,” the speculative mode will undergird all readings even as we put speculation itself up for critique. If the speculative has been understood as a mode that attempts to grasp an impossible whole, that which one cannot gain experience of in the world, what is the relation between abstract, dialectical, and speculative ways of thinking? In what way has speculative thought informed how we theorize the ecology/the environment, and what do speculative-fictional ecologies do or offer beyond just “imagining otherwise”?

The course provides a historical account of the field of ecocriticism/ecotheory alongside major environmental movements, and locates in fiction and art ecological otherwises and critiques of the climate-changing present. Key themes and subfields of the course include the history of the wild/wilderness and settler colonialism, the nature/culture binary, nature writing, the nonhuman turn, feminist/queer/trans ecologies, the Black horizon, utopia and apocalypse, climate fiction, ecomedia studies, systems theory, animal studies, futurisms, Indigenous studies, the Anthropocene and racial Capitalocene, and others.

Theory and philosophy readings may include works by Whitehead, Hegel, Todd, Jameson, Muñoz, Woods, Buell, Tsing, Haraway, Cronon, J.T. Roane, Alaimo, Chen, Hayward, Heise, Nixon, Parikka, Garrard, Merchant, Yusoff, etc.

Possible authors of fiction include Callenbach, Ballard, Le Guin, Wilk, Stanley Robinson, Tchaikovsky, Butler, Negarestani, and Ghosh.