Postgraduate Course: Green Thoughts: Landscape, Environment and Literature (PG Version) (ENLI11193)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course is about how the environment is imagined and written in an era of ecological crises; in other words, how to think ¿the ecological thought.¿ Focussing on post-war and twenty first-century British writing, including the so-called ¿new nature writing¿ and ¿new nature poetry¿, the course will ask students to consider how ideas of place, landscape, nature, and the non-human world have been shaped by awareness of man-made climate destabilisation and accelerated extinction. Much of this writing is motivated by a sense that a connection with the non-human has been a casualty of modernity, exacerbated by globalisation and the threats associated with climate change; other writing on the course expresses scepticism that a recovery is possible, or even desirable. All writing on the course exists in the shadow of the Anthropocene, the idea that humanity¿s impact on global ecological systems has reached proportions previously only exhibited over geological time. This course asks students to read with a mind to responding to questions about the relationship between landscape and memory, the compatibility of regional and (inter)national identities, the possibility of interaction between human and non-human worlds of perception, and the value and validity (or otherwise) of the idea of wilderness. We will endeavour to trouble binaristic thinking about human and non-human, and the complex nature of time in the Anthropocene.
The course will quire students to engage with contemporary literary eco-criticism, as well as a range of interdisciplinary environmental theory. It will also prioritise considerations of literary form and genre. The course will therefore ask students both to assess the capacity of these forms to engage a sense of ¿placedness¿, and to assess the limits of formal boundaries.
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| Course description |
Seminar Schedule
1. Introduction ¿ Kathleen Jamie, ¿Airds Moor¿
2. Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House; essays from Findings and Sightlines
3. Harriet Tarlo (ed), The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry
4. Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem
5. Michael Symmonds Roberts and Paul Farley, Edgelands
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
6. Alice Oswald, Dart
7. J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
8. Intersectional ecologies (selected material provided by tutor)
9. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
10. Gillian Clarke, Ice
This option course, offered by Dr David Farrier, aims to introduce students to thinking about and reading literary texts from an environmental perspective, by inviting them to look at the range of British writing grouped under the heading of "new nature" writing, or contemporary green writing.
This course is about the pull of wild places, and the remaining possibilities of wilderness. Focussing on post-war and twenty first-century British writing, but also taking in the work of Romantic, Victorian and Modernist authors, the course will ask students to consider the influence which fantasies of places "outside history" and human interference play in understandings of landscapes, identity, the past, and nature. Much of this writing is motivated by a sense that connections to a more "natural" way of living have been lost to the pace of modernity, often exacerbated by the threats associated with climate change. Other writing expresses scepticism that such a recovery is possible, or even desirable. This course asks students to read with a mind to responding to questions about the relationship between landscape and memory, the compatibility of regional and (inter)national identities, the possibility of interaction between human and non-human worlds of perception, and the value and validity (or otherwise) of the idea of wilderness. Students will be invited to consider these questions in particular in relation to the possibilities offered by literary writing, and Jonathan Bate's assertion that poetry, and all literary writing, has a special capacity to give expression to the "song of the earth".
The course will also prioritise considerations of literary form and genre. The texts are limited to the UK, and to either poetry or travel/non-fiction. Non-fiction writing bears much of the current burden of the "new nature" writing, along with poetry. This reflected in the fact that both forms privilege a single perspective (the "I" describing the world); yet travel/non-fiction is also typically a relatively under-valued genre. However, many of the non-fiction texts on the course challenge easy distinctions between poetry and prose, and the course will therefore ask students both to assess the capacity of these forms to engage a sense of "placedness", and to assess the limits of formal boundaries.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
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
Selected Secondary Reading
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
Karla Armbruster (ed), Beyond Nature Writing
Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast
Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecologies
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth
J Scott Bryson, Ecopoetry
Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Laurence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader
Jason Cowley (ed), Granta 102: the New Nature Writing
Roger Deakins, Wildwood
John Elder, Imagining the Earth
Rcahel Falconer (ed), Kathleen Jamie
Terry Gifford, Green Voices
JJ. Long and Anne Whitehead (eds) W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought
Lee Rozelle, Ecosublime
Roy Willis, Man and Beast
Edmund O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
MSc only version of UG course ENLI10356 |
| Keywords | Green |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr David Farrier
Tel: (0131 6)50 3607
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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