TRAGIC ECOLOGIES: SCHEDULE
Please note that because this class is experimental, our schedule and readings are subject to change. Items marked with an asterisk are available online, via our course blog.
Thursday, January 14 | What is Tragedy? What is Ecology?
Introduction: Energy regimes and plot forms: FirstDayHandoutTragicEcologiesUndergrad
Thursday, January 21 | The Passion of the World: Coordinates
John Clare, “The Badger,” “The Tame Badger,” “To a Winter Scene,” “To a Fallen Elm, “The Nightingale’s Nest,” “Songs Eternity,” “The Flood,” “Insects,” “Nutting”*: ClarePoems
Richard Anderson, “The World is Dying– And So Are You”*: http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/07/opinion/op-9312
George Monbiot, “John Clare, The Poet of Environmental Crisis — 200 Years Ago.”*: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/john-clare-poetry
Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”*: CrutzenGeologyofMankind
Chris Jordan: Midway: Messages from the Gyre*: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018×24
Greg Gerrard, “Animals”*: GerrardEcocriticismAnimals
Thursday, January 28 | Disaster and the Problem of Genre
John Keats, “To Autumn.”* http://www.bartleby.com/126/47.html
George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Darkness.”* http://www.bartleby.com/41/476.html
The Dark Mountain Manifesto*: http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
Bill McKibben from The End of Nature* (Please read only first chapter): McKibbenEndofNature
Timothy Clarke, from The Cambridge Companion to Ecocriticism*: CambridgeIntrotoLitandEnvironment
Ursula Heise, “Lost Dogs, Last Birds, Listed Species, and the Cultures of Extinction”*: HeiseLostDogsLastBirds
Thursday, Feb 4 | Pastoral
William Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere,” “The Ruined Cottage,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “The Thorn,” “Nutting,” “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” “O Nightingale! Thou surely art,” “Appendix A: “There is an active principle alive in all things.” WordsworthPoemsTragicEcologies (note poems are slightly out of order here).
Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City, pp 1-45; please entire PDF, focusing on pp. 1-8 and 13-45: WilliamsCountryandCity
Jerome McGann, from Romantic Ideology*: McGannRomanticIdeologyWordsworth
Selected paintings, John Constable* (Please search the internet for Constable’s works and familiarize yourself with his style; you might start here (http://www.john-constable.org/slideshow.html) though the interface is pretty hokey. We’ll look at several paintings in detail during class.
[CLOSE READING DUE, PRIMARY SOURCE]
Thursday, Feb 11 | Counterpastoral
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Deirdre D’Albertis, “Dark Nature: A Critical Return to Brontë Country”*: D’AlbertisDarkNature
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, (selections, optional): 165-196 . Please note I’ve made the Williams OPTIONAL for this week. R.WilliamsCountryandCityforWutheringHeights
Wuthering Heights PPT: WutheringHeightsMainPPT
Wuthering Heights Text: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/768/768-h/768-h.htm
Wuthering Heights (1992): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104181/
Thursday, Feb 18 | Counterpastoral II
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, cont’d
The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, selections (title page, table of contents, xiii-xlviii, 1-12; 328-340; 392-395; 430-438): BronteSiblingsAngriaGondalSaga
John Ruskin, “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century”*: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20204/20204-h/20204-h.htm
John Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” in Modern Painters*: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/
Selected paintings, J.M.W. Turner* (PPT coming soon; please feel free to scour the web on your own in the meantime.)
Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages”*: JaneBennettAssemblagesfromVibrantMatter
Thursday, Feb 25 | Elegy
John Milton, “Lycidas”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173999
Shelley, “Adonais”: http://www.bartleby.com/41/522.html
From The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry (THE PRINTED BOOK): Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” “Tithonus,” Charlotte Brontë, “On the Death of Emily Jane Brontë”; “On the Death of Anne Brontë”; Emily Bronte, “Remembrance,” “The Night is Darkening Around Me”; Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” “To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore”
Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”*: GrahamSeaChange
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”*: MourningMelancholia
Tim Morton, from The Dark Ecology of Elegy*: The_Dark_Ecology_of_Elegy
Jeremy Jackson, “Ocean Apocalypse” (YouTube)*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY
Michael Snow: La Region Centrale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYr_SvIKKuI
Elegy PPT
Thursday, March 3| Counterelegy
Jennifer Chang: Guest Reading and Discussion of Modern(ist) Elegy / Pastoral
Robert Hass, “Introduction.” In The Ecopoetics Anthology* (Includes Hass’s introduction, several poems by Jeffers, and one poem each from Hass and Jennifer Chang — please read all of this): EcopoetryAnthologyHassChang
After discussing with Prof. Chang, we will delete the extra Jeffers poems, and instead read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/252114#poem
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land*: http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land facsimile manuscripts*: TheWasteLandManuscripts
Thursday, March 10 | NO CLASS; SPRING BREAK
Thursday, March 17 | Dark Natures | Class meets in Murray Room, 5th Floor Lau
Mid-term exams distributed on Monday, March 14.
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (Please read at least the first half of the novel, but try for the end.)
Richard Kerridge, “Ecological Hardy”: EcologicalHardy
Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”*: LatourAgencyattheTimeoftheAnthropocene
[MIDTERM EXAMS DUE BY EMAIL FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 5 PM]
Thursday, March 24 | NO CLASS; EASTER BREAK
Thursday, March 31 | Nonhuman Times
Complete The Woodlanders.
Reread carefully Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”*: LatourAgencyattheTimeoftheAnthropocene
ALSO READ:
Thomas Hardy, “Hap,” “Neutral Tones,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Minute Before Meeting,” and “Afterwards.” (These poems are available in your Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry.)
Thursday, April 7 | Nature’s Economy and the Shipwreck of the World
Thomas Hardy poetry from last week, cont’d.
Hardy PPT 2 : Hardy2ndPPT
David Christian, Maps of Time (YouTube), from 12:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSiGSIiyjZs
Into Eternity (trailer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk
Gerard Manley Hopkins, all selections in anthology
From Bernadette Waterman Ward, World as Word:
(I’ve replaced Ward’s somewhat dated reading with some of Hopkins’ own journal entries, here: GMHopkinsJournalsExtract
Tim Morton, from Ecology Without Nature*: EcologyWithoutNature
Michael Madsen, dir., Into Eternity: (Note this film is on reserve for our class at Lauinger library; please watch it there, or with our class. To study on your own, this is streamed version via a French cable channel; the film is in English but there are French subtitles, which you can ignore: https://vimeo.com/111398583)
OPTIONAL: Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief”: LeMenagerPetroMelancholia
Mired in the Bayou, art installation: http://inhabitat.com/presenting-mired-in-the-bayou-an-inhabitat-oil-spill-exhibit-nyc/bp_oilspill_benefit0001/
BP Oil Spill Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfop1sgyOdc&src_vid=mCWW5xt3Hc8&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_117723#t=38s
Manley Hopkins (GMH’s father): A Handbook of Average: https://books.google.com/books?id=C7kDAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=manley+hopkins+handbook+of+averages&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwin4JW07_fLAhWLqR4KHYEKA_sQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thursday, April 14 | Future Humanisms
Benh Zeitlin, dir. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Film available on our class Blackboard site, under TOOLS / SHARESTREAM MEDIA MANAGER / VIDEOS; also on reserve as DVD at Lauinger Library.)
Patricia Yeager, “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology”*: http://southernspaces.org/2013/beasts-southern-wild-and-dirty-ecology
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. (This book was required as a purchase from the bookstore, but I have also located a PDF: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwiQpK_Q0PrLAhWF7B4KHY9wBicQFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgailepranckunaite.com%2FNaomi%2520Oreskes-The-Collapse-of-%2520Western-Civilization-2014.pdf&usg=AFQjCNGT4ipwi1jvBZTq_ZOlj7R_Jg8sgw&sig2=eQeOL9NJbJHw8TMr8Sjwng&bvm=bv.118443451,d.dmo
Margaret Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene”*: http://post45.research.yale.edu/2013/06/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/
Juliana Spahr, selected poems*: SpahrWellThenThereNow & and “Misanthropocene: 24 Theses”: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwie6cffyvrLAhWL1B4KHcJiBCUQFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcommuneeditions.com%2Fmisanthropocene%2F&usg=AFQjCNFv5j89xVU1trUQKPswVR6Kmhoq9g&sig2=lpoEwgFblGimvpDmAbMUdQ
Spahr and Hass, Lannan 2015: https://vimeo.com/123777668
Thursday, April 21 | Worldmaking
Spahr reading: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spahr.php
Percy B. Shelley, Mont Blanc (version A only); “Ozymandias”; “To a Skylark;” Triumph of Life; “On Life;” A Defense of Poetry. (Plus endnotes): PercyShelleyTriumphOfLifeEtc
Thomas Hardy, “Shelley’s Skylark” HardyShelleysSkylark
No Man’s Sky, select articles, videos, reviews (asterisks next to the crucial ones):
**”World Without End” (New Yorker): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian
**”Inside the Artificial Universe that Creates Itself” (Atlantic): http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/
**”How No Man’s Sky’s Infinite Universe Actually Works” (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueBCC1PCf84
**”Galactic Map Puts Scale of No Man’s Sky Into Perspective” (GameInformer): http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/12/08/galactic-map-puts-scale-of-no-man-s-sky-in-perspective.aspx
“I Found Inner Peace Playing No Man’s Sky” (The Verge): http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11152396/no-mans-sky-preview-sean-murray-interview-ps4-pc
Here are some additional resources if you’re interested: http://www.gameinformer.com/p/nomanssky.aspx
Gameplay 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLcjvIQJns0&nohtml5=False
Gameplay 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-uMFHoF8VA
Thursday, April 28 | Ending is beginning
Class wrapup and presentations of research.
SPECIAL SESSION:
Tuesday, May 3 | Ecology, Tragedy, and the Animal: A Graduate Mini-Conference
Mini-conference and reception. Graduate section will be presenting research projects.
[SEMINAR PAPERS DUE IN HARD COPY, FRIDAY MAY 6, 5 PM]