17400

WiSe 12/13: HS - Literature and Media - Nature Post-Nature: Literature and Film

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

This course will examine the various attempts by contemporary writers and film-makers to reimagine and renegotiate the fraught relation between humans and the world around them after the emergence of ecocritical practice and theory in the 1990s. How do we imagine 'nature' and the 'natural' after postmodernism? How does language and culture mediate our relationships to the non-human world? How do terms such as ecoethics and bioethics come into play in the mediation of this relationship?

We will begin the semester by looking at a selection of key Romantic texts in order to examine the idea of the pastoral and the division of nature and culture as it appears at the onset of modernity. We will then proceed to critically analyse a range of contemporary cinematic, fiction and non-fiction texts which in various ways dispute and/or contest the construction of the human subject in opposition to the living world and its non-human others. Over the course of the semester students will be encouraged to interrogate contemporary revisions and critiques of the pastoral, of the idea of wilderness and the wild, and of the human subject as radically superior to the non-human world and its non-human animal others.

NB: This subject is run in conjunction with MA-T 17401. Students are required to enrol in both parts of the module in order to participate in the course.

Set Texts: Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Berger, John.King. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Herzog, Werner, dir. Grizzly Man (dvd) Penn, Sean, dir. Into the Wild (dvd) Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals.

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the commencement of the course.

Assessment: One essay of 7500 words due at the end of semester. Regular attendance and active participation in seminar discussions will also be expected as a component of successful completion of this course. Schließen