In this class, students will learn theoretical perspectives and critical approaches to examine literary texts from an ecocritical perspective in the context of the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene refers to our present era of environmental destruction and crisis, in which human activities are said to amount to geological forces, the effects of which are experienced by different groups of humans and nonhumans in differing, and often highly unequal, ways. The course focuses on the genre of American and British (new) nature writing, a genre that, specifically in England, has undergone a remarkable renaissance during the past two decades. Considered as a genre that privileges the perspectives of white male explorers of the outdoors and a realistic mode of representation, our course begins with a complication of this view by first discussing an African American text – Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo (1988) – before we turn to two recent examples of the British new nature writing by an English male and a Scottish female writer respectively.

Please purchase and read the following books (there is no preferred edition):
Eddy L. Harris, Mississippi Solo (1988).
Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (2007).
Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (2012).