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.
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
Communicate complex ideas in environmental literar...
Learning Outcome 02
Interpret a range of primary and critical texts an...
Learning Outcome 03
Critically analyse evidence in environmental liter...
Learning Outcome 04
Critically analyse key literary theories and conce...
Learning Outcome 05
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.
20%
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.
40%
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.
40%
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, Environment. Routledge, 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 Press. 2016.
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.