SF-1192 Dark Ecologies
Ecological awareness forces us to think and feel at multiple scales, scales that disorient normative concepts such as present, life, human, nature, thing, thought, and logic. In this course, we will use the ecocritical framework of "Dark Ecology" to interpret literary texts, our everyday reality, and to mediate our understanding of current environmental debates. A holistic issue we'll investigate throughout the course is the role that the arts can play in heightening our awareness of the ecological challenges we face today and in promoting environmental advocacy. Some of the questions we'll address include the root causes of our environmental crisis, whether anthropocentric and/or humanist subjectivity is adequate (or increasingly problematic) in the face of contemporary ecological problems, the extent to which identity politics (including concepts of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and species) can inform our understanding of environmental debates, and the issue of technology's impact on how we think about "nature" today.