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Ecocriticism, Globalization and Cosmopolitanism

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This seminar will focus on the connections between ecocriticism, globalization processes, and cultural perspectives that reach beyond local or national frameworks to transnational and global horizons. We will consider in what ways recent theories of cross-cultural awareness that have variously crystallized around the terms transnationalism, critical internationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and risk theory/risk perceptions, on the other, can be brought into dialogue with environmentalist and ecocritical discourses. The concept of "globalization" that will inform this course refers not only to economic shifts, but also to the multiple and often divergent social, cultural, organizational, technological and media-based developments that make up the complex set of processes implicit in it. We will discuss in what ways environmentalism and ecocriticism have engaged with and resisted transnational perspectives, what ecocriticism stands to gain and lose from such frameworks, and why, when, and how such perspectives have translated into literary and other cultural artifacts.

Questions

The seminar is designed to consider questions such as:

  1. In what ways do theories of transnationalism or cosmopolitanism have to be adjusted in view of environmentalist/ecocritical thought, and in what ways do or might ecocritical and environmental discourses accommodate transnational perspectives? In what ways can environmentalist thought--American environmentalist thought in particular--expand from the local to the transnational?
  2. How do scientific expertise about environmental questions and a detailed knowledge of other cultures relate to each other? What are the difficulties in linking these two types of knowledge? In what ways should each be ideally inflected by the other?
  3. How should transnational environmentalist perspectives engage with the legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism? Specifically, how do environmental movements avoid becoming--or being perceived as--neo-colonial power vectors in their own right? In what ways do colonial/neo-colonial legacies inflect literary or cultural production (e.g. through the exportation of Western genres or forms)?
  4. What principles should guide environmentalist/ecocritical thought and action in cases where human development and environmental protection do not neatly line up with each other, or even run counter to each other? In what ways do cultural differences matter in such considerations?
  5. In what ways do perceptions and experiences of risk create or threaten communities at the transnational level? What is the relationship between risk perceptions and particular cultures?
  6. In what ways do environmental movements in different parts of the world define and use notions such as "nature," "landscape," "environment," "humans/animals/plants," "species," "wildness" vs. "tameness" or "domestication," "purity" vs. "pollution," "health" vs. "disease," and related concepts? How do differences in the conceptualization of such terms reshape what we conceive of as awareness of nature or environmental engagement?
  7. What literary/aesthetic strategies and forms are most suitable for the articulation of transnational environmental awareness? Which are most problematic?

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. (Chs. 2, 3, 9)

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage , 1992. [1986] (Chs. 1-2)

Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martínez-Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan, 1997.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Nixon, Rob. "Environmentalism and Postcolonialism." Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, et al. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 233-51.

O'Brien, Susie. "Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization." Canadian Literature 170-171 (Autumn-Winter 2001): 140-58.

Robbins, Bruce. "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms." Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 246-64.

Seminar Leader

Ursula Heise is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. She specializes in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her major fields of interest are theories of modernity, postmodernity and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, science fiction, and media theory. She has published articles on contemporary authors from the U.S., Latin America, and Western Europe. Her book on the postmodern novel, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, Postmodernism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997. Her most recent book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2008. She is currently working on a book project entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature.

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