ENG 314Literature and the Planet

Catalog

ENG 314 Literature and the Planet - This seminar will examine how a range of contemporary writers, and thinkers, have sought to represent the growing global environmental crises of our age and to imagine alternative ecological futures and solidarities for the planet. Reading a number of novels from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and the U.S., alongside work in environmental and postcolonial theory, we will focus on how the environment and environmental crises of our age reflect global legacies and structures of inequality, violence, and empire. Some specific topics will include: climate change, ecological imperialism, oil and resource scarcity, theorizing human and non-human relations, the Anthropocene, and planetarity and world literature. We will also address the question as to what role literature can or might play in enabling us to think the "planet" and to address these vast environmental issues. In particular, how might the novel, a form adapted to narrating the story of individual lives, be stretched to represent broad social formations and long-term ecological processes, such as the "slow violence" of climate change? We will also consider the possibilities and limits of thinking, imagining, and acting at the level- or scale- of the planet, when, in the face of ever more frequent and intensifying ecological disasters, it seems the planet is increasingly at stake. Among the authors we will read are: Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh, Ruth Ozaki, Indra Sinha, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Cormac McArthy, Barbara Kingsolver, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Secondary Readings will include works from Gayatri Spivak, Rebecca Solnit, Raymond Williams Naomi Klein, Rachel Carson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Wai Chee Dimock, and Rob Nixon.