This course satisfies the 1898-present Historical Breadth requirement for English Majors.
In this course, we will study environmental rhetorics. This means that we will not only study the rhetorical strategies and devices working in discourses of environmental awareness, education, activism, and justice, but we will also examine the belief systems that undergird and are mobilized in those discourses. We will begin by tracing a global, cross-cultural history of humans’ relation to “nature,” and in doing so, we will problematize the binary (the opposition) of humans and nature. We will explore other ways of thinking about the boundaries between human/nonhuman animal, civilization/nature, intelligence/instinct, survival of the fittest/collaboration. We will examine the ways in which scholars and artists can help us to explore those boundaries — blurring, if not displacing them.
You’ll conduct ongoing research, maintaining an annotated bibliography across the semester, in order to prepare for a variety of projects and exercises. Your final project will be a creative work — rendered in any number of possible genres/forms… from an essay to a series of poems to a short story to a game to a dance to a song, etc. 