LIT 499-05 Greening the Cannon
Class meetings: Monday and Thursday 9:30-10:50am
Professor: Lawrence McCauley
Ecocriticism is grounded in the belief that both current ecological crises and western civilization’s long history of environmental degradation are connected to tacit cultural assumptions about the place of the human species in the natural world. Thus the ecocritical project is to examine cultural representations of the idea of “nature” and of the relationship between humans and their environment. This seminar will ecocritically examine a specific cultural site–the English curriculum. We will apply “green-reading” practice to commonly taught canonical texts with the intention of ecocritically analyzing not only the texts themselves, but the ways in which they are often taught as well.