123222 SE Literary Seminar / BA-Arbeit / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2024W)

The normative problems associated with environmental problems have become a critical issue in particular for the poorest and most vulnerable populations, a phenomenon that has increasingly been included also in literary studies. In this seminar, we will discuss authors and texts that have in different contexts been reflecting on concepts of nature and on the relationship between nature and humans/culture. These range from Romantic and Transcendentalist representations in poetry and fiction by authors like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson to a more recent turn towards feminist ecocriticism such as Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler. We also discuss environmental justice approaches that integrate knowledge from the sciences and the humanities for claiming the equal protection and rights of all people and of nature/the environment, regardless of race, national origin, or income from environmental risks. Decolonial environmental justice perspectives and postcolonial ecocritcism (Amitav Gosh) and ecofeminist approaches address and imagine alternative cosmovisions and new forms of relationality and kinship, but also conceptualizations such as the post-human (Donna Haraway), all of which are dedicated to thinking modes of production, sociability and cohabitation Otherwise. Making claims for the protection of all populations from the effects of climate change and natural disasters, the recognition for indigenous land rights, such approaches seek to provide alternatives to Eurocentric/Occidentalist notions of modernity and growth based on exploitative imaginations of nature and unequal social structures.
The seminar will provide students with basic knowledge about a number of primary texts addressing questions around nature, culture, humans and the environment from the 19th century to the recent trend in Climate Fiction, but also Anti-Environmentalism in fictions of the extreme right. Students are introduced to key concepts, arguments and theorizations of the broad emerging field of climate fiction, ecocriticism and environmental justice that contribute to and can be subsumed under the header Environmental Humanities.