2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Mar 31, 2025

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ENG 126 - Ecofictions: Literature and Environment

The environmental crisis implicates all living beings on the planet. It poses complex challenges for scientists and policy makers, but it is also a deeply existential crisis that compels us to think about fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? how do we understand the human entanglement with the non-human world? what is the relationship between the `real’ natural world and the emergence of virtual worlds enabled by digital technologies? is a more reciprocal connection with nature possible in an era defined by capitalist relations? This course provides an opportunity to reflect on a number of key tropes in ecological thinking including wilderness, waste, animals, extinction, and transnational politics and culture. Drawing on novels, poetry, films, artworks, philosophical texts, and digital media, we will ask how literature has shaped environmental thought and action (or could). What literary genres and styles emerge to address the huge ecological challenges of our times? As we will see, concerns pertaining to `eco-politics’ are embedded in histories of imperialism, systemic racism, and discourses of sexuality. Hence our investigations address questions of ethics and relationality-specifically, whether we might cultivate more ethical relationships not only with the nonhuman world, but also with one another. A key aspect of the course will entail reflecting on your own orientation to climate change and its presence in your everyday life. Key readings may include work by Thoreau, JM Coetzee, Wu Ming-Yi, Alexis Gumbs, Amitav Ghosh, Lucille Clifton, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and more. For English majors, this course satisfies the C-2 requirement.

Prerequisites: Writing placement or IDND 018

Course Designation/Attribute: VE, WE

Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually