Introductory description

Critical Environments introduces key topics, concepts, methodologies and theoretical debates in the emergent field of environmental humanities, with special attention to its interdisciplinary origins. It allows students to navigate their own subsequent pathways through the MA in Environmental Humanities, depending on individual research interest.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Introduction: Ecology and the Environmental Humanities

Rachel Carson, “Flood Tide,” Under the Sea-Wind [1941] (Penguin, 1996)
Aldo Leopold, “Land Ethic,” A Sand County Almanac (Oxford UP, 1949)
Winona LaDuke, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures” (1994)

Week 2: Questioning environments

Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature” Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verso, 1980)
Kate Soper, from What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995)
Ramachandra Guha and J. Martinez-Alier, from Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (Earthscan, 1997)

Week 3: Anthropocene: A new approach to the humanities?

Rachel Carson, “A Fable for Tomorrow” and “The Obligation to Endure,” Silent Spring (Penguin, 1962)
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “The Meaning of the Anthropocene,” The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Pelican 2018)
Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene,” Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso, 2017)

Week 4: Commodity fictions

Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971)
Jason Moore, from Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015)
Sidney Mintz, from Sweetness and Power (1985)

Week 5: Ecologies of empire and slavery

Walter Johnson, from River of Dark Dreams (Harvard, 2013)
Alfred Crosby, from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986)
Christina Sharpe, “The Weather,” from In the Wake (Duke, 2016)

Week 6: Extractivist imaginaries

Ken Saro-Wiwa, from A Forest of Flowers (Pearson, 1995)
Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, “Introduction: On the Energy Humanities”, Energy Humanities: An Anthology (2017)
Alice Mah, from Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline (2012)

Week 7: More than human: species studies and extinction

Vicki Hearne, from Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (Simon and Schuster, 1986)
Ashley Dawson, from Extinction: A Radical History (OR Books, 2016)
Thom van Dooren, from Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014)
Anna Tsing, from The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, 2013)

Week 8: Ecomodernism, indigeneity, degrowth

Ted Steinberg, “Down, Down, Down, No More: Environmental History Moves Beyond Declension,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 260–66
Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-84
Joshua Shuster, “Where is the Oil in Modernism?” in Szeman, Carlson and Wilson (eds.), Petrocultures (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017)
Jason Hickel, “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,” Real-World Economics Review 87 (2019): 54-68

Week 9: Ecopoetics on and off the page

Cecilia Vicuña, Poetry in Space
Margaret Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene” (https://post45.org/2013/06/mourning-and-melancholia-in-the-anthropocene/)
Simon Ortiz, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (Institute for Native American Development, 1980)

Week 10: Eco-praxis: borders and migration
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories, 2015)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Articulate an informed perspective on the concept of the environmental humanities in its ecological, political and literary-cultural aspects
• Refine a sense of the theoretical, methodological and interpretive stakes of research in the environmental humanities
• Develop a focused understanding of the literary challenges in responding to such topics as climate change, environmental despoliation, species extinction and media ecology
• Adapt the theoretical debates surrounding the environmental humanities to extend research in a variety of subfields

Indicative reading list

Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review P, 2016.
Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Exploring the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001.
Anderson, John G. T. Deep Things Out of Darkness: A History of Natural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012.
Arnold, David and Ramachandra Guha, eds. Nature, Culture and Imperialism. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996.
Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: CUP, 2011.
Davies, Jeremy, The Birth of the Anthropocene (University of California Press, 2016)
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Pluto, 2015)
—. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Goodbody, Axel and Kate Rigby, eds. Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011.
Heise, Ursula K., Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Hornborg, Alf, J. R. McNeil and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds. Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007.
Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2014.
Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Allen Lane, 2014)
Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014)
Malm, Andreas, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2015)
Moore, Jason W., Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015)
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature” [2000]. Debating World Literature. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004.
Nail, Thomas, Theory of the Border. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.
Szeman, Imre, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, eds, from Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2015.
Wark, Mackenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso, 2015.
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. London: Virgin, 2008.
Yaeger, Patricia et al. “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126.2 (2011):

Research element

An essay of 5,000 words and a field trip report.

Interdisciplinary

The module involves readings from the fields of ecology, environmental history, political science and sociology.

Subject specific skills

• Ability to closely analyse a wide variety of texts with regard to their environmental implications in form, content, medium and strategy.
• Ability to conceive, plan and carry out independent research projects in the field of environmental humanities.
• Ability to participate in informed discussion of major environmental debates, issues and problems.

Transferable skills

• Close critical analysis of texts.
• Planning and organising independent research.
• Assessing questions of environmental sustainability and impact with regard to specific policies and activities.