ENGL 6660 - Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Ecocriticism and the Environmental Imagination

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

G. Hutchinson.

What, today, is the state of eco-critical theory and the environmental humanities? This course will explore recent work at the edge of literary criticism shading into ecological thought and questions of social justice alongside particularly suggestive twentieth century literary texts. We will also read earlier iterations of eco-criticism from the 1940s, a birth time of the modern environmental movement in the United States. A crucial question will be what relevance, if any, the “humanities” might have for global sustainability. Authors will include Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko, A. R. Ammons, Rob Nixon, Stephanie LeMenager, Lawrence Buell, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula LeGuin, Ramachandra Guha, Timothy Morton, and others.