Tufts University, Dan Bloom's alma mater, goes ''cli-fi'' for Spring Semester 2016 in Graduate Seminar Taught by Professor Elizabeth Ammons

 

 

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
TUFTS UNIVERSITY
Course #0292-04

Graduate Seminar: ''Climate Change''

Professor Liz Ammons, chair of the English department at Tufts * (where Dan Bloom spent four years in the late 1960s and early 1970s majoring in literatures of the world and teaching a class of two in the Experimental College program.)

This seminar focuses on American literature and the environment, concentrating on 20th and 21st Century texts and a number of issues — environmental racism, eco-imperialism, animal rights, the relationship between gender and the social construction of nature — and, above all, global warming.

We will think about climate change as a biospheric reality and as a metaphor that speaks to an ethical imperative.

Reading in the course is multicultural, bringing together Native American, African American, white European American, Latino/a, and Asian American perspectives, with these as probable primary texts:

Henry David Thoreau, Walden;
Percival Everett, Wounded;
Rita Wong, forage;
Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead;
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake;
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower;
Simon Ortiz, from Sand Creek;
Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus;
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day;
 Louise Erdrich, The Road House

Theory will come from diverse vantage points, both within and outside the U.S.:

Aldo Leopold,
Vandana Shiva,
Rob Nixon,
George “Tink” Tinker, bell hooks,
 Bill McKibben,
Robert Bullard,
Jacques Derrida,
Linda Hogan,
Wangari Maathai,
Dan Bloom

 In addition to novels, movies, poetry, and theory, we will consider the political and aesthetic work of several documentary films. Pedagogy — how to teach in an age of accelerating climate crisis — will be a conscious concern.