Kommentar |
Ecocriticism explores how we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment in cultural production. It is inspired by, but also critical of, modern environmental movements. Questions posed and approaches to answering these inquiries in the field of Ecocriticism are myriad while also applicable to examining all areas of cultural production, problematizing a coherent image of the field’s scope. As such, this course utilizes Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom (2012) as a guiding trajectory to introduce students to this relevant and flourishing field. Following Garrard, we will focus on master-metaphors, established literary tropes, and topics like the pastoral, wilderness, apocalypse, and animals, among others, all of which circulate, impact, and construct our understanding of nature and our relationship thereto. Parallel, students will examine how these ways of imagining, constructing, and presenting nature are employed in contemporary visual narratives, namely environmental picture books and graphic novels. Though often disregarded as 'childish' or 'simplistic', picture books and graphic novels are rich narrative forms that utilize a unique interdependence of text and image to tell a/multiple story(ies). Accordingly, this seminar will supply students with the terminology and methods to approach these multimodal sites. Following the seeds planted almost two decades ago by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd in their essay collection, Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (2004), this course examines a sliver of contemporary Children’s Literature in the contexts of Ecocriticism, ecology, and environmentalism, highlighting some of the shared tropes and strategies through which illustrators and writers of children’s picture books and graphic novels address environmental questions.
This course ends with a literary studies term paper that is due on 30.09.2021. Admittance to the exam is contingent upon the successful completion of the annotated bibliography assignment where students will locate and identify voices in the field of Ecocriticism as well as further writers/illustrators of environmental picture books/graphic novels by researching, collecting, and recording both primary and secondary texts on assigned topics.
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Literatur |
Required texts (please be sure to buy these particular editions)
-Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2012.
-Scieszka, Jon. Astro-Nuts: Mission One: Plant Planet (S. Weinberg, Illus.). San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2019.
All other required readings (primary and secondary) will be made available on the course Moodle page. |