ENG 5933 Hand Spring 2021

This course will provide students with an understanding of ecocritical theory and animal studies as applied to a variety of texts from early modernity to the present. Our approach will involve several diachronic case studies, in which we will read sets of associated texts through an ecocritical lens. Each set of texts will offer opportunities for historicizing discursive constructions of the non-human as well as for literary critical analysis and reflection on contemporary ecocritical engagements in a variety of texts and media.

With topics ranging from occult knowledge, the environment, and gender, to climate change, animal spectacles, and transspecies transformations, our course readings and discussions will question the contributions of literature both to environmental degradation and to environmental justice, both to alienation from fellow creatures and apathy in the face of planetary crises and to interspecies collaborations and transspecies becomings. Students will develop a strong foundation in ecocriticism and animal studies which might then inform their teaching and research. In addition to regular short response essays and a presentation, students will produce a piece of original scholarship which may be presented as a conference paper or developed into a publishable article.

Our critical lexicon will be informed by selections from, for example, Donna Haraway, Ursula Heise, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing, Laurie Shannon, Erica Fudge, John Berger, and others. Primary texts may include, for example, medieval bestiaries, early modern natural histories, a variety of emblems, plays such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, essays by Bacon and Montaigne, Beckett’s Endgame, Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Schweblin’s Fever Dream.