“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Rice Clases Today


ENGL300
Practices in Literary Study

Professor Timothy Morton
01:00PM - 02:15PM TR BKH 102

ENGL459
Literature and Ecology: Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

Spring 2013
4:00PM–5:15PM TR BKH 229
Professor Timothy Morton

In the late eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust, a layer that is now detectable in Arctic ice and in deep lakes. There thus begun what geology now calls the Anthropocene.

The literary period from the eighteenth century, though long, contains some remarkable similarities both in terms of content and in terms of form, similarities that we can now study under the aegis of the term Anthropocene.

In addition to investigating how literatures in English tackle (or not) the Anthropocene, this capstone seminar will be exploring the ways in which literary criticism and theory, and philosophy more generally, has (and has not) addressed the topic of human intervention in ecological and geological reality.


1 comment:

Henry Warwick said...

Just read this yesterday - could be good for your class:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/?p=801