Ecological Expression: Re-creating Our World

English 2xx -- Ecological Expression: Re-creating Our World
Spring Semester 2014: Monday-Wednesday, 2:30-4
One in a 360° cluster of courses on Ecological Literacy:
Economics, Education, Expression, co-taught with David Ross and Jody Cohen

"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly" (Martin Luther King, Jr., "Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution," 1968).

"I think that for fiction writers, there is this latitude that is special - you don't have to follow any narrow line of thought. You don't have to prove something that is already often obvious. The presentation in fiction is very free, and you can play with or examine different ideas that you might not be able to if you have to focus or narrow your investigation" (Karen Tei Yamashita, The Latitude of a Fiction Writer: A Dialogue).

“...literature is important…as the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. Literature…is…a mode of cultural work, the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions that cannot yet be spoken" (Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender, 1998).

"The real, material ecological crisis...is also a crisis of representation. The inability of political cultures to address environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative" (Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, 1998).

This new course offers a shared exploration of imaginative texts, with a global reach and in a range of genres (photography, film, poetry, as well as multiple narratives, in forms that will vary from satire to science fiction, from apocalypse to utopia). On field trips to local sites, we will also study “representations” of the world in the form of various "shaped spaces," such as refuges, arboretums and gardens (possibilities include the municipal waste landfill in Conshohocken; the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum; Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill; Chanticleer, a pleasure garden in Wayne; and The Village of Arts and Humanities on Germantown Avenue). Assisted by visual artist Ava Blitz (who uses the camera and the computer as draftman’s/printmaker’s instruments) we will create our own verbal and visual representations of those spaces. Our orientation in reading, representing and re-creating these texts, images and spaces will be that of second-wave environmental criticism, which acknowledges both ecocultural complexity -- the ways the ecocritic cannot be extricated from social institutions -- and the "long mixed up" quality of natural and built environments, with a particular focus on urban landscapes.

Students will be asked to post twice-weekly reflections (one extending our class conversations about the readings, one describing our recurrent visits to selected on- and off-campus sites) on Serendip, and to create three 4-pp. web events. Their finale will be a 12-pp (or equivalent) project of their own "ecological expression," which might take any one of a large range of forms, and satisfy some of the requirements of the other two classes in the cluster as well.

Required reading includes six book-length texts: Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, Karen Tei Yamasita's Tropic of Orange, Bessie Head's When the Rain Clouds Gather, M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild. The remainder of our texts are available on-line, in our password-protected site.

An Invitation to Step “Inside/Out”

In the center of a harsh and spectrumed city
all things natural are strange.
I grew up in a genuine confusion
between grass and weeds and flowers
and what coloured meant.... (Audre Lorde, “Outside”)


 "...our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here."
Chris Jordan, Midway: A Message from the Gyre
(see also J Henry Fair's Industrial Scars and Andy Goldsworthy's Philosophy)

Day 1: W, Jan 22
Audre Lorde's poem, the photographs of Chris Jordan, Henry Fair,
and Andy Goldsworthy, with assistance-in-thinking from
Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature

Clarifying and complexifying our terms:
what is "nature"? "unnatural"? "ecological"? "unecological"?
"environmental"? "not environmental"? "inside"? "outside"?
"country"?" "city"? "separable"? "inseparable"?
"recreation"? "re-creating"?

Fri, Jan 24 to waste treatment plant in Conshohocken?


I. First of the Five Phases of "mutual generation":
Water/Winter (stillness, storage)

I. Second Phase: Wood/Spring (growth)

View from Anne's office window, each spring @ BMC

Day 6: M, Feb. 10 Karen Tei Yamasita, Tropic of Orange
Day 7: W, Feb. 12 "

Day 8: M, Feb. 17 "
Day 9: W, Feb. 19  ?

Fri, Feb. 21 to Village of the Arts and Humanities?

IIII. Third Phase: Fire/Summer (flowering)

IV. Fourth Phase: Earth/transition (leveling)

Village of Arts and Humanities, October 2009

Day 14: M, Mar. 17 J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
Day 15: W, Mar. 19  "

Day 16: M, Mar. 24 "
Day 17: W, Mar. 26 ?

Fri, Mar 28 to Morris Arboretum?

V. Fifth Phase: Metal/Autumn (harvesting)

Ecological Journey from Campus to the World Day 18: M, Mar. 31 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide Day 19: W, Apr. 2   " Day 20: M, Apr. 7   " Day 21: W, Apr. 9 Ramachandra Guha,  “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique." Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 71-83. Fri, Apr. 11 to Chanticleer?

VI. Sixth  (as yet unimagined) Phase



rachelr, In Between Dreams

Day 22: M, Apr. 14 Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
Day 23: W, Apr. 16 "

Day 24: M, Apr. 21 "
Day 25: W, Apr. 23 Marilyn Robinson, Housekeeping (?)

Day 26: M, Apr. 28 "
Day 27: W, Apr. 30 "

Fri, May 2: Final Presentation?
what can we do to make the natural world more present here?
more "unnatural"? how to call folks' attention to the world in
which they live, which they alter by living?

Anne's Reading Notes

Additional Thoughts/Options for Field Trips
1) MLKing Day: Camden Center for Environmental Transformation:
http://camdencenterfortransformation.org/ourmission.html
2) bike ride along the Schuylkill River Trail: http://www.traillink.com/trail/schuylkill-river-trail---
valley-forge-to-philadelphia.aspx?gce=201302_2&utm_expid=5284793-4
beginning @ Audobon's house @ Mill Grove! http://www.schuylkillriver.org/Detail.aspx?id=36
(read Crow Planet, Flight Maps, and/or Life of the Skies...?)
3) Tinicum (bird sanctuary...continuing the theme)
4) Laurel Hill: http://www.thelaurelhillcemetery.org/index.php?flash=1
(cemetaries as sites of sanctuary/also introduce the problem of "waste")
5) Southwest Wastewater Treatment Plant on Enterprise Ave:
http://www.waterandwastewater.com/plant_directory/Detailed/437.html
6) Morris Arboretum