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Course Description

Summary

The course will be divided into four sections corresponding to four elements of nature that have been transformed in the anthropocene. In order to strengthen our environmental literacy, we will read scientific articles as well as news articles about wildfires in California, Europe, and Australia. We will educate ourselves about disappearing islands through the rise of sea levels. Finally, we will learn about massive hurricanes as well as the contamination of our air and soil with toxic chemicals. We will also consider how the structural inequalities of global capitalism underlie many of our environmental disasters. This course will focus on queer, indigenous, black, and disability ecopoetics as a way to understand how writers from various subject positions have written about environmental crisis. From the pastoral to the necropastoral, readings will include work by Orlando White,  Juliana Spahr, Ross Gay, Thylias Moss, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Larry Eigner.  Students will have the choice of writing their own ecopoetry or writing about ecopoetry from a critical perspective. Students will also be required to conduct poetic fieldwork.