For this assignment, go over your notes and the syllabus, and also look ahead to what's in store to read for the remainder of the semester. Do this to refresh your memory, or anticipate gaps we'll be filling in as a class. From these discussions and past/future readings, what has stood out to you?
In your blog posts due October 10, in lieu of classes, please brainstorm what you might want to write about for your final paper. Try posing a possible research question or two, and include texts from our class that you would like to use to explore your question(s). What are some key terms you'll use to explore further in your research? What is your research "plan of attack"?
Then, do some of that initial canvasing for scholarly articles, popular cultural texts, blogs, etc-- what are others saying about this idea? Get a sense of the current discussion and literature about the idea, and report on it. What are the results of your initial research? Report on this in your blog post.
In sum, your assignment consists of several steps:
1) go over the syllabus and our class notes,
2) brainstorm ideas that stood out to you,
3) compose a possible research question or two,
4) outline a research plan,
5) do just an initial bit of that research, and
6) write about it on the blog.
This is in lieu of classes and readings next week, so it should offer a nice opportunity to take a step back and assess what you've learned, what compels you about the questions of the class, and articulate a plan to give you greater purpose in the class for the rest of the semester. This will be a great way to stake your own claim in the work we're doing.
We'll be writing paper proposals with the results of this work, so consider this just the beginning...
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| Take a step back and survey the "landscape" of ecocriticism. What do YOU see? |
My research project will be exploring our cultural relationship to our closest living relative: the chimpanzee. By dissecting our society’s stereotypes and associations of the chimp present in popular media, I intend to illuminate the way we think about this species, animals in general, “nature,” and ourselves as non-animals.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most common portrayals of chimpanzees in film and other media is in the role of the clown. The chimp in these instances is usually docile, friendly, silly, and non-essential to the plot. Another common stereotype on the opposite end of the spectrum is the chimp as a dirty animal, rattling its cage bars and flinging its own feces at innocent passersby. Rarely are chimps portrayed, or treated, as individual and non-interchangeable.
On the other side of the coin is our portrayal of ourselves as chimpanzees. One of the more glaring examples of this occurred during the 2008 election when anti-Obama campaigners sold merchandise with a picture of a chimpanzee or some other monkey over the “Obama 2008” slogan. This example of modern racism reflects our mistreatment of animals as well as our mistreatment of ourselves.
The text that I intend to draw most strongly off of is Garrard’s “Ecocriticism.” I also intend to branch out of the course texts and read some of Donna Haraway’s literature on our relationships to animals. If this project doesn’t become too unwieldy, I may also include a section on our use of chimpanzees in zoos and test labs.
This is a great topic! And already well-thought-out. I like your thesis that poses this as a paradox: our simultaneous devaluing of "other" humans and and of chimps. Garrard does indeed help you in this regard. There is so much literature out there on 'animal studies' that may or may not help you, so I think the stuff that sticks to popular culture will be your best bet. Haraway's book Primate Visions is the place to start with her. It's a wonderful book, but give yourself some time with it. It's a beast. oops! There I go! Good work, Jackie. I look forward to further discussions!
DeleteSammy
ReplyDeleteFor my final project I want to apply an ecocritical lens to Alaska’s tourism. More specifically I want to look at the way in which Alaska tourism is advertised and the rhetoric that is used in these types of advertisements. I expect that the use of frontier and wilderness rhetoric will be a common theme in many of the advertisements and I want to take a Garrard like approach in examining the use of these tropes in literature and more specifically ads and websites. I hope to analyze the way in which the use of this rhetoric shapes Alaska tourism, and perhaps even then way in which this may have helped further the popularity of “ecotourism”. Living in Juneau and being from Alaska I cannot help but feel surrounded by Tourism, and I have heard many arguments in regards to the ways in which tourism is a sustainable industry for Alaska and something that should continue and be furthered.
I often feel as though Alaska is “frozen in time” because of the use of last frontier rhetoric, and the fact that in some towns, they are entirely designed and maintained around the idea of portraying themselves as frontier towns for the summer tourists. But what about when the season is over, or what about the people in urban areas where perhaps tourism is not a driving force. Working in the tourism industry I had a very eye opening experience. It was hard for me to not feel as though I was selling my clients and idea of wilderness and I told them, “we are the only people in this specific area at this moment in time.” I am really curious in how the rhetoric of tourism creates an identity for Alaska, and if this contributes at all to a sense of responsibility for wilderness by the people who live here year round. As residents, if we were not surrounded by people here to see the wild places and animals that Alaska has to offer, how would that make us feel differently about this place.
For material I plan on using Garrard, and also looking at tourism websites, especially the one that is sponsored by the state of Alaska, and also general websites for tours and trips in Alaska. There is also some books on wilderness tourism in Alaska in Egan that I briefly looked into.
Sammy, this is a good start, but I want to push you to hone a more specific argument about this. The observation that Alaska is frozen in time by tourism rhetoric-- creating a landscape that tourists want to see-- is a fine start. But then what? You might want to consider some of the work of geographers who write about "Disneyfication", which is this postmodern impulse to make life imitate artifice. When I walked the main road in Skagway this summer, I had this Disneyfication experience: "this looks like something in Frontierland!" Which is a form of simulacra-- when the "authenticity" of reality is ironically measured by something artificial. I also like your focus on what this all does to people who live in these places. Does it keep THEM stuck in time? These insights and debates are surely important at this historical moment, when manufacturing "culture" in exotic places like Borneo appeases tourists. Whole communities put on a "village/tribe" act-- replete with loin cloths and "traditional" dances, instruments, spears, etc-- but when the tourists leave, out come the boom boxes, tennis shoes, and technologies. The "frozen in time" notion deserves your close attention for sure: why do we go to different PLACES to experience different TIMES?
DeleteA key term for you may be "heritage tourism".And of course you'll want to use some of the other key terms I threw in this post, if they're of interest. There is an vast body of scholarship about this issue: heritage tourism and its effects on local communities. So, your own angle on this, which I gather from your question: "does this rhetoric contribute to a sense of responsibility for wilderness by people who live here year round?" is excellent. Consider it perhaps your "research question." What's your hypothesis? Good work...I look forward to hearing more!
The notion of “dark ecology” has caught my attention most of everything we have discussed this semester. I already had a bit of this concept in my head from watching “The Examined Life” – a documentary on a number of contemporary philosophers and critical thinkers. In the film, Slavoj Zizek talks about “ecology without nature.” Reading Gerard’s book I recognized – and agreed with – this idea when he outlined dark ecology. I have done some informal research about Zizek and Timothy Morton – the man mentioned in Garrard who coined the phrase “dark ecology” – and it appears that Morton may have inspired Zizek in this direction. I am interested in what aesthetic, ethical, and political critiques can be made from the perspective of dark ecology as elaborated in Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature. These two books will serve as my main texts, but I will certainly be looking for more along the same vein. I hope for this research to open the door to an ecological perspective that is neither a dogmatic anti-essentialism nor a naïve romanticizeation of nature. The film “Manufactured Landscapes,” which we watched in Environmental Film, might be a good place to contextualize this perspective. I have only yet to read what is available within the two texts over google books, but I will be getting a hold of them and keeping an eye out for cultural, literary and political texts to critique.
ReplyDeleteWill, I, too, really love this theory and would love to learn more about it through your research. You could potentially do a Garrard-ian lit review/genealogy of the idea and its implications. Look at this example for a model of what I'm talking about. This woman wrote a lit review of the "new materiality" in environmental criticism: http://www.academia.edu/1554897/Material_Ecocriticism_Materiality_Agency_and_Models_of_Narrativity.
DeleteI could imagine you doing something similar regarding the "dark ecology" turn in ecocriticism. This would be a great contribution to the field!
The first time I ever heard of this kind of thinking was through ecofeminist readings of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The revaluation of the swamp as a valuable environment emerges in that criticism. You might be looking, therefore, at either postcolonial ecocriticism or, perhaps even more helpful, African American Ecocriticism. There are about 2-3 major texts on this, one which just came out by Paul Outka, and another by Kimberly Smith, though there are even texts on African American Environmental Thought as well. But this notion that "ecology is ideological"--ala Zizek-- is totally accepted as a premise in African American ecocriticism, and a retooling of a "dark ecology" certainly a major important move toward environmental justice, as we really saw in Beasts of the Southern Wild as well.
Also, the QUEER ECOLOGY works we'll be reading all gesture in these directions too, so perhaps peer through that book as well.
That all said, you want to be very careful NOT to essentialize all African American ecolit as "dark." The point is to insist on rejecting notions of "purity" or "pristineness" as a requisite for "nature," as such a view of nature requires defining some kinds of environments and some kinds of people as somehow less pure or less environmental, which is where you're trying to go when you write that you seek an "ecological perspective that is neither a dogmatic anti-essentialism nor a naïve romanticizeation of nature."
This, to me, seems the big "SO WHAT" of this project-- GREAT STUFF. Has important environmental justice implications!
Through this course and other classes I took in the past, we have studied western world’s view of nature was basically came from Judeo-Chiristian's view of natre, which is human could “exploit” nature because nature is god’s creation for human. Everytime we discussed about it, I always wondered about how other religion sees nature. However, most of the books and classes never mentioned about these. In addition, I also wondered how myself and people in my country view nature as? How about other Asian countries which have different religious backggound? To answer these questions, I decided to research about ecocriticism in Asian countries, such as how they value and see nature.
ReplyDeleteSince “Asia” is too broad, I have to pick few countries that I focus on researching. I also want to discuss about how our religious beliefs connects to our way of viewing nature. When I was in Nepal, I was shocked by the fact that people were throwing garbage everywhere especially into the river even though they worship river as a sacred place. Through my research last few days, I found an article that says Zen and Bhuddhism are viewed as great harmony with human and nature, but in Japan, we have many pollution issues more than US has, and also some group of people still treal animals in bad ways like the movie “the cove” shows.
In books we have read in this class, many authors discussed about histories and religious views to explain ecocriticism of western people, women, or any particular group of people. Some countries really concern about pollution and really focus on improving and protecting their envirionment, on the other hand, others are still not caring about nature. In my research, I would like to research about Ecocriticism in Asian countries, then discuss how their belief system is connecting to their relationship with nature.
Yosuke, this is fantastic, and you're right, we have not gone into the religious roots of environmental behavior, much less comparatively across religions! Yet there are certainly a good many texts on this. A reader you may want to start with is This Sacred Earth. http://books.google.ca/books/about/This_Sacred_Earth.html?id=qtJp7aAZV_oC.
DeleteYour entrance point into these questions seems to be your observation that the spiritual view of nature of a particular culture seems to have little to do with the actual treatment of nature. This observation seems a great launching point for a research question for your project: Why does the religion fail to shape environmental behavior in these places- Nepal, Japan, for example? What other forces are at play, and where can we see the religion playing a role, if not in the trashing of sacred rivers and slaughtering of dolphins?
I definitely want to push you to speculating some answers to your questions!
I love this topic because it draws on your worldly experiences and forces us to rethink the religious determinism of so many of these theories (i.e. we seek to get "back" to nature because of Original Sin in the Bible, or whatever).
Looking forward to how this develops for you!
A contemporary understanding of rhetoric entails a history of manipulative and exploitative use in political, financial and nearly all spheres of social interaction. The manipulative use of rhetoric has permeated has unabashedly been set forth as common place in advertising of all sorts, be it political, economical, health and safety oriented or self-promoting. A response to this has occurred wherein rhetoric is oppositional to truth or obscuring at best. The intent of this essay is to reexamine rhetoric in the formation of discourse, specifically in an ecological mode. A dualistic opposition of rhetoric and truth, specifically in conservationist, ecological and environmental ideals, allows for a post-structuralist deconstruction of sorts. In this effort the works of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault will be useful for setting up a deconstruction of the binary opposition rhetoric/truth through the discourse of ecological tropes, as outlined by Greg Garrard in Ecocriticism, and ecological, epistemological, hermeneutical and social structures. Our earlier readings should prove helpful for drawing out ecocritical tropes in everyday life such as Jennifer Price’s Flight Maps and Alex Wilson’s Culture of Nature. I’ve found several minor essays that outline avoidance and negative reactions to rhetoric, specifically in conservation biology, as well as those that place rhetoric within discourse and thus within the formation of knowledge. I would also like to bring in Vaclav Havel’s A Word About Words for context on rhetoric, knowledge and power formation.
ReplyDeleteCasey, I like this project's goal, to "reexamine rhetoric in the formation of discourse, specifically in an ecological mode." Environmental rhetoric/discourse is certainly my own research interest, and there is a lot to look at there-- http://www.amazon.com/Ecospeak-Rhetoric-Environmental-Politics-America/dp/0809317508/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349971082&sr=8-1&keywords=ecospeak. (side note: Kevin M is presenting a paper on a panel with this guy next month!).
ReplyDeleteThe journal Environmental Communication may also hold a lot of good stuff for you. But your point is to examine this "truth/rhetoric" binary, and I'm even more intrigued by this. Will you argue that there is no distinction between them, and that all truth is a form of rhetoric? And what then are the implications for ecology? Are all truth-claims, no matter how 'empirical' or 'objective,' mere discourse? Is all science, then, a form of rhetoric? If so, what do we do about this?
This has further implications for what we discussed earlier in class about the role of language in detaching us from the "real" world. If we conclude that all language is a form of distancing us from truth, and we like to think of "nature" as "truth," then language fundamentally is unnatural.. Or is it?
I love thinking about the implications of this line of inquiry. I look forward to what you conclude!
I want to focus on the automobile industry and how a reduction of usage of vehicles could be a very prominent, and out-spoken way to begin to ‘live differently’ so that other people may be influenced by the change. Also want to tie that in to the ways in which highlighting and promoting positive outcomes of changes and differences that have been made to improve the environment can be used as a more enticing tool of encouragement rather than highlighting all the damage that has already been done. I will work to use examples where abolishing the use of a vehicle has shown multiple benefits and will focus on the positive aspects of such a change as going from wheels to heels. I will most likely also include the element of economy and politics and how the automobile supports both, as well as the ways in which traffic laws and driving itself is institutionalized. I will also be suggesting alternatives in regards to the employment problem that would occur if car manufacturers lost their demand. Further, I plan to extrapolate on the ways in which the vehicle has become a symbol of industrialism, a product, and idolized ‘baby’ of industrialism. I want to look at the ways in which things have changes because of the automobile and what aspects of nature have been altered to make room for the vehicle to be used and to persist. I want to depict the vehicle as a type of parasite that benefits the host, but is still very parasitic and overall detrimental to natures’ well-being as well as ours. From manufacturing, to statistics on death and accidents, to economic contribution, chemical necessity and production of the vehicle, to subconscious social concepts that the automobile has left us with – but, will avidly attempt to support and supply ideas that HAVE worked and that CAN work. I will be pulling from writers like Gorz, who writes in the Utopian Genre, Wilson, and Foucault who offers ideas of institutionalized ‘traps’ that we live in – which I feel contributes to the influence of traffic laws and the overall unseen mentality and operational quality that the vehicle makes us to take on.
ReplyDelete1. Car Culture in the United States: Capitalism and the Environment
ReplyDeleteMy plan for this project is to read highways, automobiles and oil consumption as a reflection of our country’s perspective and relationship to the environment. The paper will be divided into two sections: roads and the cars themselves. In the first section I would address the way suburban areas are laid out to endorse cars as transportation; the highway and road systems bridging the nation and tearing apart the landscape; and finally the road systems in National Parks. The second section will discuss cars as a right of passage, a status symbol and the “green” car market.
Annotated Bibliography:
1. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
I will use chapter 4 on Wilderness to inform my paper on how our culture's perspectives on wilderness can explain our interactions with the natural world. I will also use the following chapter, Apocalypse, to understand rhetoric used by the green car industry.
2. Gartman, David. Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logistics of the Car. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
The author provides insight on the way cars came to be a status symbol. I want to use his description of Fordism.
3. Goffman, Ethan. "Highways and Environmental Impact Issues." Highways and Environmental Impact Issues. N.p., Apr. 2005. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. (web adress omitted due to blogger not wanting me to post URLs of a certain length)
This online article provides a lot of useful information on how highways came to be and their subsequent effects on the landscape.
4. Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Print.
This book will provide insight to what our park roads say about our perception of nature in the chapter The View from the Road: Recreation and Tourism. I will also use the chapter Nature at Home: A Social Ecology of Postwar Landscape Design for insight on the development of suburbia.
2. The Ecological Indian: Then and Now
ReplyDeleteIn this project, I would attempt to address a few different topics that intrigue me about the shifting perspective of indigenous people and cultures in the United States. The breakdown of the paper would have two sections. The first would pose the question: what makes native cultures so admirable to an environmentalist and what misconceptions do we have? I would analyze the false claim that the natives didn’t alter the environment they lived in then describe the ways they interacted with the landscape. I would then address the problem of viewing these cultures as a static image, when in reality; they are evolving like any other culture. This point will transition the project into the second section on the present. My focuses of this half will be on where the Ecological Indian fits in to modern society and what do we do now? I will argue that these claims are too broad, that every native person is more “in tune” with the natural world is a sweeping generalization, and that we wouldn’t make similar claims to other cultures. However, there is something to be gained by respecting and honoring these cultures and their practices. Instead of yearning for natives to lead us back in time to a more simple life, we can instead integrate ancient indigenous wisdom with modern science and perspectives.
Annotated Bibliography:
1. Braun, Bruce. The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002. Print.
Braun explains the dilemma of the Ecological Indian and tensions between environmental groups and indigenous interest very well in the whole book, but especially chapters 2 and 3 titled: Producing Marginality and Saving the Clayoquot, respectively.
2. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
In chapter 6 on Dwelling, Garrard explains the trope of the Ecological Indian.
3. Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W. Norton &, 1999. Print.
This is an essential reading to understanding the misconceptions and ideologies associated with indigenous peoples.
I am also considering an interview with Ernestine Hayes about a more local perspective on the matter.