Ecocomposition has been an acknowledged approach to writing and focus in the teaching of writing in Rhetoric and Composition since at least 1986 when Marilyn Cooper’s “The Ecology of Writing” was first published. Ecocomposition would be further developed by Sid Dobrin and his various interlocutors over the next two decades, connecting with pedagogies interested in place, community engagement, nature writing, etc. However, only recently (in the last decade), the field has gained some momentum in working to decenter the human in the humanist traditions that are rhetoric and writing. Some efforts have involved discovering and/or making salient alternative rhetorical traditions that might map different (less human-centric) histories of the field; others have sought to make nonhuman animals and things the objects of study in rhetoric; still others have endeavored to show how animals and things are, in and of themselves, rhetorical. We struggle, though, to become a thoroughly posthumanist field, which might require leveling the field of rhetoric so that other creatures and things might join the work of the field — not just as objects of study or as examples of rhetorical nonhuman agents but as co-creators and mutual world-makers. Rhetoric is not only confronted with the confounding question of how to decenter the human but with what that decentering might mean in terms of ethics — e.g., the ethical choices writers, scholars, and our students make in writing, as well as those that can be made in any “rhetorical” situation. How do we co-create a piece of writing with another species of animal, for example? How do we negotiate with the other animals and things on the scene?
To engage with these questions (and others), we’ll read the following (sometimes in excerpts):
Ira Allen’s Panic Now?
Barnett’s Mourning in the Anthropocene
Demos’s Decolonizing Nature
Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life
Sachs’s treatment of Aristotle’s On the Soul
Harris’s Wild Souls
Despret’s Living as a Bird
Meijer’s When Animals Speak
Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees
We’ll also read a number of shorter pieces by folx like Tina Gerhardt, Alex Parrish, and Justyna Włodarczyk, who have written about human-nonhuman animal relations and animal subjectivities (and about what it means to try to speak about and/or for another animal).
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
- to understand how ongoing ecological crises are reshaping the discipline of rhetoric
- to explore how the inclusion of nonhuman animals in the work of rhetoric might be possible, as well as what their inclusion might do to the discipline
- to identify the ways in which students might participate in these changes to/in the field
- to participate in related (eco-rhetorical) discourses through writing a scholarly and/or creative work
ASSIGNMENTS
You will share reading responses (RRs) with me throughout the semester so that I can help you navigate the readings, as well as identify a topic for your final projects. Most importantly, the RRs will be your way of guiding our class discussions, informing what kinds of questions we explore.
You will be required to share an annotated bibliography and proposal in the last half of the semester and to share drafts of your final projects toward the end of the semester.
The final project will be a scholarly paper or piece of creative writing that could be revised for publication — e.g., exploring the ethics of writing about another animal (including humans)/objects or writing a memoir for a particular animal/object.