Undergraduate Course: Green Thoughts: Landscape, Environment and Literature (ENLI10356)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course is concerned with how contemporary poetry responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the 'era of the human' characterised by dramatic human interventions in ecological processes at a planetary scale. In a period of climate breakdown, what can poetry have to say? By examining a range of voices, including indigenous poets from the Arctic and the Pacific, we will explore how poetry in both lyric and experimental modes provides new frameworks for thinking about what might constitute a poetics of the Anthropocene. Green Thoughts will introduce students to current trends in literary ecocriticism and criticism emerging from the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. These include the problem of 'lively materials' like plastic and fossil fuels, the possibility of multispecies ethics in a time of extinction, and how the climate crisis is a colonial legacy. |
| Course description |
This course is concerned with how contemporary poetry responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the 'era of the human' characterised by dramatic human interventions in ecological processes at a planetary scale. In a period of climate breakdown, what can poetry have to say? By examining a range of voices, including indigenous poets from the Arctic and the Pacific, we will explore how poetry in both lyric and experimental modes provides new frameworks for thinking about what might constitute a poetics of the Anthropocene. Green Thoughts will introduce students to current trends in literary ecocriticism and criticism emerging from the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. These include the problem of 'lively materials' like plastic and fossil fuels, the possibility of multispecies ethics in a time of extinction, and how the climate crisis is a colonial legacy.
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- In addition to the skills training common to all English Literature Honours courses (essay writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning) this course will aim to develop in students the ability to articulate (in written and oral forms) a considered, informed sense of the breadth and range of eco-critical writing, theory and contexts.
- Students will also be asked to evaluate a range of key concepts in eco-critical studies,particularly in terms of their relevance to current environmental contexts and their application to the primary texts.
- Students will be expected to demonstrate the ability to work with interdisciplinary material.
- Students will articulate how their own thinking and research agenda has developed.
- Students reflect constructively on good learning practice
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Reading List
Julianna Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came
Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Iep Jaltok
dg nanouk okpik, Corpse Whale
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Swims
Adam Dickinson, Anatomic
Sean Borodale, Bee Journal
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Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr David Farrier
Tel: (0131 6)50 3607
Email: David.Farrier@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms June Cahongo
Tel: (0131 6)50 3620
Email: J.Cahongo@ed.ac.uk |
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