Teaching Responsibility
LJMU Schools involved in Delivery:
Humanities and Social Science
Learning Methods
Lecture
Seminar
Tutorial
Module Offerings
6129ENGL-JAN-MTP
Aims
1. To recognise the emergence of a strand of international modern fiction focused on environmental crisis;
2.To locate this discourse in relation to an older literary tradition focusing on the relations between human history and the natural world;
3.To consider the representation of established discourses of identity (including gender, race, class, sexuality, age, etc.) within the modern environmental novel;
4.To theorise the novel as a medium amenable to the representation of environmentalist concerns;
5.To encourage students to develop a greater understanding of the connections between their own experience and the critical/ cultural histories introduced on the module.
Learning Outcomes
1.
recognise the environmental imagination as a central concern within a range of contemporary cultural and critical practices;
2.
articulate an understanding of the connections between knowledge production and environmental degradation across a range of social institutions;
3.
understand the impact of the modern environmental imagination upon both the production and the problematisation of traditional modes of identity;
4.
identify and utilise a range of reading techniques appropriate to environmentalist analysis;
5.
appreciate the ways in which the concerns articulated in modern environmental fiction bear upon their own experiences and practices, both within and outwith the university.
Module Content
Outline Syllabus:Naomi Alderman, The Power (2017)
Margaret Attwood, The Year of the Flood (2010)
T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Timothy Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment(2011)
Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014)
Johanna Sinisalo, Birdbrain (2010)
Module Overview:
This module focuses on modern fiction focused on the urgent environmental crises with which we are now obliged to reckon. Some of the issues you will engage with on this module include climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and the alternative approaches to nature represented in indigenous narrative systems.
This module focuses on modern fiction focused on the urgent environmental crises with which we are now obliged to reckon. Some of the issues you will engage with on this module include climate, the environment as a concept, the non-human, and the alternative approaches to nature represented in indigenous narrative systems.
Additional Information:This module explores contemporary interventions and explorations of the climate crisis. It uses eco-critical theory and recent scholarly debate to consider how authors from a range of backgrounds have imagined and represented the challenges of the unfolding impact by humans on the environment. This module explores contemporary interventions and explorations of the climate crisis. It uses eco-critical theory and recent scholarly debate to consider how authors from a range of backgrounds have imagined and represented the challenges of the unfolding impact by humans on the environment.