Why environmental cultural studies is important!

http://features.peta.org/VeggieLove/

Sturgeon's book makes a strong case for the importance of critically examining popular culture for its political implications.  There is no such thing as harmless, innocuous advertising, and the ones that use the ideology of "naturalization" are particularly problematic.  Why?  On what grounds does she make the case that popular culture is so important to examine, and do you agree?  Why are gender, race, and nation important lenses to examine cultural texts that use "nature"?

YOUR TASK:

In your blog, explore any or all of these questions by posting an image or cultural text that you analyze in a Sturgeonian way.  For example, Sturgeon might argue that the "veggie love" PETA advertisement campaign that I posted here trades on sexism to promote vegetarianism, a point that is heightened when we "meat our meat" (a pig) at the end of a series of thumbnail shots of the women we could choose to meet, which likens the women to the pig.  "Helping animals" (an ad inside the ad) seems totally consistent with the kind of objectification of women going on here.  I could unpack this further with closer analysis about the absence of racially non-white women in it...  Or is the whole thing ironic?  See where I'm going?  TRY IT!

What are YOUR interests? Final Paper Initial Research Blog

What question or set of questions are you finding yourself most interested in, in our ecocritical readings and discussion?

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...

Take a step back and survey the "landscape" of ecocriticism.  What do YOU see?

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?

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?