Garrard: Dwelling, Animals, and Futures

Spaceship Earth

In these last three chapters of Ecocriticism, what does Garrard explain or argue that you find to be the most compelling reason to study the environment?

Environmental tropes' imbrication with regimes of social control, such as Nazism and neocolonialism?

The value of literary critical skills to analyze and affect notions of the environment in the public sphere?

The importance of environmental literary studies especially in the face of postmodernism and late capitalism?

Garrard 

These are just a few ideas, but what struck YOU as the most compelling reason to be trained in ecocritical skills today?  And, while you're at it, what are those skills again? 



If you're interested in the full-length of that environmental humanities video featuring Garrard and others, of which we saw 10 minutes in class last week, here's the link: Environmental Humanities video featuring Garrard and others

Garrard's Ecocriticism: Defining the Field?

Garrard's Ecocriticism attempts to define the field of ecocriticism.  But the text is invariably organized and argued through Garrard's lens.

How would you define his approach to the field, and what aspects of his approach do you like or dislike?

For example, I really like the way he pairs readings of 'canonical' texts like Wordsworth and Thoreau with unconventional texts, like events.   I also like the way he frames ecocriticism's fraught relationship with science, and his gloss of the issues we raised about language on the day we read Gary Snyder.

Also, I like his definition of ecocriticism as a way of reading the world, and I like the organization of the book in "tropes" rather than chronology, or case studies, or other ways of organizing books.

What did you make of his unique organization?

Is this a good introduction to the field, or are you left wondering what he's missing?

Interesting Article on CCD

I ran across this today. This article isn't really related to any particular reading, but I thought it was kind of important. I've been hearing over the last few years about vanishing bee populations, colony collapse disorder. Apparently, three recent studies have figured out why. Here's a link to the article if you're interested:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/04/09/mystery-of-the-disappearing-bees-solved/

Writing Contest-- Final Project Option

I love to make final projects in my classes opportunities for students to write for a broader audience and purpose than our class.  To that end, if I or you see anything that's worth considering writing for (instead of a final research paper), let's share those with each other.

Here's one from me.  It's a call for submissions for authors "under 30" about "coming of age after the end of nature."

This is precisely what we've talked so much about in class already-- 

If there's no "nature," what is there? 

Where does this leave your generation?



Read below. If you think it might be interesting to write for this purpose and on this topic, then use the final paper assignment in this class to do so, and we can work together on revising it.

Here are the details:

Call for Submissions:

Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age after the End of Nature
“When the wind and the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, … 
man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw.”  ~ Henry Beston

We are seeking essays, poetry, or fiction by writers age 30 and under 
for a literary anthology exploring changing human relationships with 
the natural world.  What are the challenges, fears, dreams, and sources 
of resilience of young writers—“Cosmic Outlaws” who have grown up on a 
fundamentally changing planet?

Submission Guidelines:

• Essays and short fiction up to 4,000 words
• Up to 3 poems
• Include your name, address, e-address and phone number and a brief 
bio with all submissions

Deadline:  December 31, 2012

Send submissions to both:

Julie Dunlap  juliejdunlap@earthlink.net /6371 Tinted Hill/Columbia, MD 
21045

and 

Susan A. Cohen  sacohen3@aacc.edu/40 Johnson Road/Pasadena, MD 21122

Thank you for your help in forwarding this call for submissions to your 
undergraduate and graduate students, colleagues, and friends.

Peace, Susan

Women Writing Nature: Gendered Interventions?

This week's readings come from an edited collection that asks, is nature writing gendered?

Do women notice some features of nature that men do not? Do women experience nature differently than men? What about the way they write about nature is gendered?

Whether that "difference" is understood as biological (i.e. women are more "in tune" with nature because they are inherently more "natural"), or as cultural (i.e. women are more cooperative), or as political (i.e. women are more likely to suffer environmental injustice), how do women intervene in thinking and writing nature?

The Culture of Nature: Alexander Wilson

Alexander Wilson "reads" landscapes as texts, much like we practiced reading pink flamingos as texts during week 1.

What do you think of how he organizes his book--- as "framed by two events, two places"? In the spirit of introducing ourselves to the field of ecocriticism, if we think of it as a way of looking at the world, what does Wilson's approach allow him to do?

What is similar and different between his arguments and Jennifer Price's?  Like Price, Wilson outlines lots of paradoxes or ironies within environmental discourse.  What are some of these?

If you were to examine a landscape or event in the way that Wilson does, to update his work and apply it to your own interests, what would you look at?

Pink Flamingos and the Cultural Politics of "Nature"

Price provocatively suggests that even though we'd all like to think that pink flamingos have nothing to do with nature, they in fact embody our relationship to nature because "Nature and Artifice" are "locked together absolutely in the same history" (113). In 2009, Madison, WI named the lawn ornament its official bird.

Plastic and Lawns: As American as Mom and Apple Pie....
The pink flamingo, as an emblem of American nature-artifice relations, is an extension of the American love of plastic and of lawns, arguably two of the most evil icons in the environmentalist imagination.

What are some ironies that the pink flamingo symbolizes? 
Is the pink flamingo potentially subversive? 
In what universe, that is, does Water's film Pink Flamingos operate as a class critique of elite and heteronormative views of nature? 
From a "queer ecocritical" perspective, why does the pink flamingo stand in for queer pride, and what does this have to do with nature?

Or do pink flamingos only "kill the ability to distinguish between art and life" (134), and therefore only "transgress" the boundary between the fake and the real (i.e. "nature")?

What does nature mean to me? Jennifer Price as the "Thoreau of the mall"

Our first reading this semester is from Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America.

The book is a great introduction to what it means to be an ecocritic. Sure, ecocritics analyze much more canonical "literature," from Beowulf and the Bible to Terry Tempest Williams and Edward Abbey.

 But I'm hoping to introduce you to ecocriticism more as a way of seeing the world around us than as a specialized set of practices beholden to expert scholars. Price is illustrative of this approach. She calls herself a "Thoreau of the mall," and argues that TV can tell us as much about nature as putting on a pair of hiking boots. She has a "deep uneasiness with entrenched American definitions of nature" (xvi), and the book mixes genres of personal narrative/nature writing and ecocriticism. As such, its audience is wider than most ecocritical scholarship.

 What do you think of the style/genre/audience of this text? Digestible distillation of complex concepts, or dumbed down drivel? 

If "Americans' most everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture" (xviii), we must take these encounters seriously.

What are some of the insights in Price's writing do you find particularly interesting?