This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

“The Anthropocene” names the notion that the earth has entered a new epoch in its history: a geological era defined, for the first time, by changes that human beings have wrought. As a provocation to grasp the sheer force and planetary scale of human damage to world ecologies, as well as to recast the current climate as the long-term consequence of human (in)action, the concept has been wildly successful. But every aspect of “The Anthropocene” has also been brilliantly contested, and not only, as one might think, by climate deniers.
In this class, we delve into the history, theory, poetry and fiction of “The Anthropocene”— and its alternatives – focusing on how the proposed scientific inscription of “the human” (anthropos) into the history of the earth has ignited profound interdisciplinary debate about the meaning and validity of “the human,” “history,” and “the planet." We will take up the new friction and collaboration that the concept has generated between ecology and literary studies and sample forms of "climate fiction" that long precede the advent of the term.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills