Unit rationale, description and aim

Climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction event, the Anthropocene: we live in an era defined, for a diverse and growing array of commentators, by a sense that human beings have begun transforming their environments, comprehensively and catastrophically. As these terms imply, our environmental sensibilities are developed and conveyed through language, image, and narrative. 

Environmental literary studies approaches texts—scientific, policy, and popular texts, as well as conventionally literary ones—to ask how they reflect, cultivate, and challenge ‘environmental’ meaning. This unit familiarises students with the range of theoretical approaches environmental literary studies takes, and enables students to apply those approaches to primary texts. This involves firsthand experimentation with ‘nature writing,’ toward better understanding the assumptions and knowledges that inform our sense of essential environmental concepts. Diverse primary texts allow students to see environments are described and imagined in varying ways. Students explore the theoretical and methodological range of environmental literary studies and apply ‘ecocritical’ tools to interpret primary works of pivotal relevance for environmental thought.  The aim of this unit is to equip students with critical tools and theoretical frameworks of environmental literary studies to assist them to analyse how various texts reflect, shape, and question environmental meaning.

2026 10

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Prerequisites

ENGL200 Nineteenth-Century Literature: Revolutions in Writing OR ENGL202 Twentieth-Century Literature OR ENGL204 American Writing OR ENGL205 Australian Literature for Children and Young Adults OR ENGL210 Shakespeare and the Renaissance OR ENGL221 Cultural Studies OR ENGL224 Romantic Generations OR ENGL231 Australian Literature OR ENGL232 Irish Literature OR ENGL234 The Literature of Other Worlds: Fantasy and Science Fiction OR ENGL235 Writing with Style OR WLIT200 Medieval and Renaissance Masterpieces: the Rise of the English Literary Tradition OR WLIT201 The Age of the Novel: 1600-1900 OR WLIT300 Romanticism to Postmodernism: Movements Toward the Literary Present

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Apply theories of environmental literary studies t...

Learning Outcome 01

Apply theories of environmental literary studies to generate original interpretations of a variety of literary texts.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC2, GC7, GC8, GC11

Communicate complex ideas in environmental literar...

Learning Outcome 02

Communicate complex ideas in environmental literary studies for specified audiences, using both critical and creative methods. These methods may engage audio, digital, oral, visual and/or written media, as appropriate.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC9, GC10, GC11

Interpret a range of primary and critical texts an...

Learning Outcome 03

Interpret a range of primary and critical texts and use them to sustain a nuanced, evidence-based argument in a research project.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC2, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC10

Critically analyse evidence in environmental liter...

Learning Outcome 04

Critically analyse evidence in environmental literary studies according to the methodological and ethical conventions of the field.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC9, GC10

Critically analyse key literary theories and conce...

Learning Outcome 05

Critically analyse key literary theories and concepts, and recognise and reflect on the significance of complex literary texts in imagining and interpreting the world over time.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC2, GC9, GC10, GC11

Content

Topics may include: 

  • Origins of and approaches to environmental literary studies and ecocriticism
  • Historical writing about 'nature'  
  • Romantic, literature and nature 
  • The development of the idea of the ‘environment’ 
  • The idea of the Anthropocene 
  • Park and gardens in literature
  • Literary genealogies of pastoral and wilderness
  • Post-apocalyptic novels and environments
  • Climate fiction ('cli-fi')
  • Eco-feminism
  • Postcolonial ecocriticism and global climate justice 
  • Animals and plants in environmental literary studies 
  • The ‘new’ nature writing 
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander conceptions, (and critiques) of 'environment' 


Active literary/critical methods 

  • Practices of locating scholarly sources in environmental literary studies and applying them to original interpretations of primary texts.

Assessment strategy and rationale

Environmental literary studies posits that our understandings of ‘environment’, as well as closely-affiliated concepts, such as ‘nature’, take shape through diverse, complicated, and dynamic interactions between material realities and their representation, or between ‘world’ and ‘word.’ One corollary of this premise is that literary (among other) representations of environment reflect and inform environmental understandings in ways that may be deep and consequential. The Reflective Task is an exercise that engages students with the complexities of representing the environment through writing and explores how language both shapes and is shaped by our perceptions of ‘nature’.  

The Research Task asks students to build on this understanding of the dynamics of environmental writing by constructing an independent research assignment investigating a selection of primary texts. The assessment will require that students close read one or more primary text(s) and develop their readings, through dialogue with pertinent scholarly sources, into an original interpretive argument. This partly entails situating primary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.  

The Written Task assesses how well students can demonstrate a high-level understanding of ecocritical approaches; employ close reading of primary texts; and synthesise these aptitudes to illustrate that these theories and texts have real-world implications.  

Overview of assessments

Assessment 1: Reflective Task   The key...

Assessment 1: Reflective Task 

The key purpose of this assignment is for students to develop a sense of the issues involved in writing about nature. A creative exercise is coupled with a reflective component; together, these practices develop an awareness that concepts of ‘nature’ inform, and are formed by, texts and other cultural artefacts.

Weighting

20%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC7, GC8, GC9, GC10, GC11

Assessment 2: Research Task   The aim o...

Assessment 2: Research Task 

The aim of this assessment is that students demonstrate skills in close reading, analysis, writing, and research to produce an evidence-based argument interpreting primary texts within a framework of ecocritical approaches. 

Weighting

40%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2, LO3, LO4, LO5
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC3, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC8, GC9, GC10, GC11

Assessment 3: Written Task   The key purpose...

Assessment 3: Written Task 

The key purpose of this task is to test students’ capacities for synthesising knowledge about ecocritical theory and a range of primary texts to demonstrate that texts and theories in environmental literary studies have real-world implications. 

Weighting

40%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2, LO4
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC8, GC9, GC10, GC11

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

This unit embraces active learning by facilitating class activities in which students are:  

1) Developing a knowledge of the relationship between primary texts, ecocritical theory, and the material world 

Students will read a range of texts in which the environment is a central concern. Students will engage in debates about our ethical responsibility towards the environment and the ways in which textual and environmental understandings are deeply entangled. 

2) Sharpening a set of skills fundamental to the discipline of English literary studies 

The active learning activities in this unit include writing creatively and reflectively; engaging in problem-solving through synthesis of close reading and a range of ecocritical theories; analysing texts by placing them within historical contexts; and situating the unit material within a real-world context of environmental risk and activism.

Representative texts and references

Clark, Tim. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2019. 

Hall, Dewey W. Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice. Lexington Books, 2017. 

Hiltner, Ken (ed). Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader. Routledge, 2014. 

Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, EnvironmentRoutledge, 2015. 

Miller, John. Empire and the Animal Body. Anthem Press, 2012. 

Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.  

Smith, Andrew, and Hughes, William (eds). EcoGothic. Manchester University Press2016. 

Tally, Robert T. and Battista, Christine M. Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 

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