What is the place of the human within nature? How are cultural concepts of what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ reflected in and shaped by texts from different periods? Where do our ideas about ecology and climate today have their roots? How can a text, or a film, be ‘ecological’? In this course, we will investigate a range of literary, critical, and filmic texts from across a wide timespan, exploring the diversity but also sometimes surprising continuity of thought across times and cultures. We will read closely, among other eco-criticism, Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology (2016), approaching their pragmatic and anti-purist ecological model critically, in comparison with other critical and textual formulations of what it means to be ‘ecological’. In medieval and early modern texts, as in contemporary film and critical writing, we will explore ecology as a formal and textural property as much as (or even rather than) a theme or issue.
