ENGL 274A: |
American Cultures and Global Contexts
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Global Ecologies |
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| Fall 2008 |
| Instructor: Stephanie LeMenager |
| Meets on: F 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM SH 2617 |
| Prerequisites: Graduate standing |
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| This is the first in a three-quarter, in-progress course (274A, B, then C) in which a final grade will be assigned after the completion of English 274C. |
| Taking a cue from Arjun Appadurai's naming of the "fluid, irregular shapes"
of modernity, we will consider the ecoscapes of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, meaning those biotic networks that make up the
world in which we live, inclusive of species, living and dead, species
marked as resource, natural or technological cycles of production and
consumption, all that comes together from the etymology of "ecology" as
oikos, economy and home. Our more specific foci will be systems of energy
production and consumption, weather and water cycles, and the problem of
sensing, imagining, and representing global ecoscapes, which we will pursue
as both an aesthetic problem and a problem of "doing justice."
Readings and film screenings constitute the bulk of the course, along with
two special colloquia featuring internationally renowned scholars Catherine
Gautier (most recently author of Oil, Water, and Climate) and Evelyn
Hu, director of the Hu Research Group and former Scientific Co-Director of
the California Nanosystems Institute.
Films, drawn from the ACGCC 08-09 series "Documenting Globalization,"
include: Up the Yangtze (2007), A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (2006),
Mondovino (2004), and Life and Debt (2001).
Readings may include articles and chapters, collected in a colloquium
READER, by Vandana Shiva (from Water Wars, Biopiracy), Naomi Klein (from
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), David Harvey (from
Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference), Ulrich Beck (from Risk
Society), Joseph Schumpeter, Charles Jeanneret Le Corbusier (from The City
of Tomorrow and Its Planning), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Theodor
Adorno (from Aesthetic Theory), Elaine Scarry (from The
Body in Pain, On Beauty and Being Just), Timothy Morton (from Ecology
without Nature), Ursula Heise (from Sense of Place, Sense of Planet),
Lawrence Buell ("Ecological Affects") and Julie Sze ("The Hummer: Race,
Military and Consumption Politics").
The course will meet twice Fall quarter and four times in Winter and Spring
quarters. It is run as a colloquium, with participants expected to give two
presentations and to turn in two approximately 8-10 page papers that reflect
the content of these presentations. The pass/no credit option best serves
this style of course, though special arrangements can be made for those who
wish to receive a letter grade. This year's colloquium anticipates the
end-of-year conference, Beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Justice, and
Global Ecology, and readings have been chosen to include speakers or
panelists involved in the conference and to anticipate the dialogues it
might produce. Participants in the colloquium are invited to act as
chairs/respondents for conference panels.
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