Art, Eco-criticism, and the Environment

3 Units

As issues of sustainability and environmental impact have become increasingly dominant concerns in contemporary society, eco-criticism has emerged as a vital methodological thread across the humanities. Motivated by ethical as well as scholarly concerns, eco-criticism not only enacts a fundamental examination of nature as an ideological construct, but also seeks to investigate the complex interrelationship between humanity and the environment. Concurrently, there has been a marked interest in studying the role of "green issues" in contemporary art, particularly in tracing the development of earth art or eco-art from the early 1970s to the present. The goal of this seminar is to forge a link between these two emergent strands by tracing the complex relationship between art and the environment from the nineteenth-century to the present, seeking to thereby assess the capaciousness of eco-criticism as a methodological approach to art history. Offered as ARTH 382 , ARTH 482 and ESTD 382 . Counts as a CAS Global & Cultural Diversity course.