English 190

Description

Note:  Newly added section of English 190 (as of 4/20):

In this seminar, we will analyze historical, contemporary, and speculative narratives that explore social locations of eco-crisis and climate refugeeism. We will consider John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz' documentary film The Plough That Broke the Plains, which both grapple with the Dust Bowl. This man-made environmental catastrophe produced one of the largest internal migrations in the nation's history—250,000 people fleeing the American south and southwest to escape devastating drought and deadly dust storms during the Depression decade. Next, we will analyze Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones and Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. These two stories of "superstorm" Hurricane Katrina lay bare the racialized and classed contradictions of contemporary ecological entropy in the United States. Our survey of the U.S. cultural imagination of eco-crisis and climate refugeeism will end with two cinematic visions of eco-crisis dystopias set in the near future: Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. 

Book List: Adamson, Joni: Keywords for Environmental Studies; Davis, Mike: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster; MLA Handbook, 8th edition; Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath; Ward, Jesmyn: Salvage the Bones

Films: Lee, Spike: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts; Lorentz, Pare: The Plough That Broke the Plains; Nolan, Christopher: Interstellar; Rivera, Alex: Sleep Dealer