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Syllabus 2017-18

Note: Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are required for purchase

Term 1


Week 1: Introduction

Ursula Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 503-16 [pdf]
Jason W. Moore, “Wall Street is a Way of Organizing Nature,” Upping the Anti: A journal of Theory and Action 12 (May 2012): 39-53 [pdf]


Week 2: The End of Nature: Literature in the Age of the Capitalocene

Bill McKibben, “The End of Nature,” The End of Nature (Doubleday): 47-91 [pdf]
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Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222 [pdf]
Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis” (www.jasonmoore.com/essays.html) [pdf]


Week 3: Enclosure/Escape/Scape

John Clare, “Journey Out of Essex” and “Poems Written in Epping Forest and Northampton Asylum” from Major Works of John Clare (Oxford World’s Classics)*
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Raymond Williams, “Country and City” and “The Green Language” from The Country and the City (Chatto and Windus) [pdf]
Iain Sinclair, from Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’ (Penguin) [pdf]


Week 4: Eco-praxis I

Henry D. Thoreau, “Walking” and “Slavery in Massachusetts” [https://www.walden.org/collection/essays/]
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Bill McKibben, “What Would Thoreau Do?” New York Review of Books, June 19, 2014 [pdf]
Raja Shehadeh, “Palestinian Walks” [pdf]


Week 5: Colonial World-Ecology

Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Dover Thrift)*
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Anne McClintock, “The Limits of Colonial Feminism,” from Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge) [pdf]


Week 6: Reading week


Week 7: American Environmentalism

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford)*
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William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Norton) [pdf]
Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-84 [pdf]


Week 8: The Carson Watershed

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Penguin Modern Classics)*
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Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP) [pdf]


Week 9: Narrating the Capitalocene I

Richard Powers, Gain (Picador)*
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Sandra Steingraber, “Prologue,” “Trace Amounts,” “Silence,” “Our Bodies, Inscribed,” “Ecological Roots” from Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Da Capo) [pdf]


Week 10: Trash

Charles Burns, Black Hole (Jonathan Cape)*
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Tim Edensor, “Waste Matter: The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World,” Journal of Material Culture 10.3: 311–332 [pdf]


Term 2


Week 1: Anthropocene Futures

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago) (e-book via Warwick library)
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Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?” New Left Review 61 (Jan-Feb 2010): 29-46 [pdf]


Week 2: Postcolonial World-Ecology I

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of the Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Wesleyan UP) [pdf]
+
Edouard Glissant, “Introductions,” “Dispossession,” “The Caribbean Experience,” “Natural Poetics, Forced Poetics,” Cross-Cultural Poetics,”from Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (U of Virginia P) [pdf]
Kamau Brathwaite, from History of the Voice: Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (New Beacon P) [pdf]


Week 3: Postcolonial World-Ecology II

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Harper Perennial)*
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Pablo Mukherjee, from Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English [pdf]


Week 3: Media as Environments

Mike Daisey, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (online pdf)
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Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Proletariat,” “Mobile” and “Aftermath,” Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Pluto, 2015) [pdf]


Week 4: Case Study: Pipeline Protest

Dakota pipeline videos (Youtube) - see forum
Stephen Collis, Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks) - see forum for pdf
Naomi Klein, “Introduction” and “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors,” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Knopf) [epub]
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Imre Szeman, “Introduction: Pipeline Politics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116.2, (April 2017): 402-407 [pdf]


Week 6: Reading week


Week 7: Narrating the Capitalocene II: (World-literary) Ecosystems

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Picador)*: Parts 1-3
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Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (Jan-Feb 2005): 71-90 [pdf]


Week 8: Narrating the Capitalocene II: Deathworlds

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Picador)*: Parts 4-5
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Sergio González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine (Semiotext(e)) [pdf]
Sharae Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (September 2012): 351-372 [pdf]


Week 9: Eco-praxis III

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Vintage)*
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Rebecca Solnit, “The Mind at Three Miles an Hour,” Wanderlust (Vintage) [pdf]
Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Ruins (film available via Warwick Library)


Week 10: Out of the ruins

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Post-Capitalist Ruins (Princeton)*

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