Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines great books and articles that have transformed human understanding of the environment. Students read classic works in their historical and scientific contexts and learn how the concepts they introduced changed human-nature relationships. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Great Ideas in Environment generally deals with two basic questions: what are the key elements of environmental literature? And what role have these texts played in forming humanity’s relationship with the environment?  Together, we will explore these questions by examining major trends that have shaped how writers have understood and written about their environments historically, and we will consider how those trends continue to influence our feelings towards, and understandings of the contemporary, perhaps more ecologically-based, world. 

By accessing various literary analysis methods and literary historical contexts, we will delve into the course readings (which represent only a small sampling of the overall environmental literary canon) to hopefully reveal a set of shared tropes and shared concerns indicative of environmental literature in general.  We will examine and discuss the ways in which poets (including some musicians), dramatists, fiction and nonfiction writers, and film-makers have addressed environmental questions through both the form and content of their works.  Finally through close readings, critical thinking, and analytical writing, we will tease out how literary and cultural forms shape the ways that people see and relate to nature and the environment, including the ecological realm and the places where people live, work, and form their identities.

Environment 100 will draw on literature that illustrates the progress of ecological thought. We will delve into and discuss selections from works as diverse as Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. This course will also draw on Rouseau, Thoreau, Vandana Shiva, and the writings of John Muir.

We will also engage in textual readings of two films: Tod Hayne’s Safe, and Soylent Green (a 1973 award winning film that highlighted the greenhouse effect long before it was common knowledge). 

Note: The content of the course is subject to minor changes depending on the amount of students and available resources.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

On successful completion of the course, students should have:

• an understanding of the different ways in which “nature” and the category of the “natural” have been conceptualized in literature at different points in historical, modern and post-modern periods;
• an ability to think critically about how different literary forms and genres can imply different attitudes towards nature and humanity’s relationship with the environment; and
• begun to think critically about the implications of the way “nature,” and humanity’s relationship to it, is represented in literature for current environmental public policy and community practices regarding the environment.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

A full reading list of etexts and scanned materials will be made available at the beginning of the term. And excerpts from the following etexts available on the SFU Library site:

• Material ecocriticism / edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Serenella Iovino 1971- editor (Bloomington : Indiana University Press 2014)
• Green history : a reader in environmental literature, philosophy, and politics / Derek Wall. (New York : Routledge 1994)