Ecological Thought

This course will serve as an introduction to the new interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. Discussing an exciting range of texts and films—from Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Arundati Roy to Ridley Scott and Werner Herzog—we will investigate how literary and cinematic works make ecological crisis perceptible. The following topics will be central to our discussions: garbology (especially hoarding, collecting, and the relation between trash and modern poetry); “slow violence” and postcolonial environmentalism; queer ecology; biopolitics; the representation of non-human animals; the effects of 24/7 consumerism; and the political uses of ecological nostalgia, disgust, grief, and wonder.