Theories of Environmental Humanities 4219-RS279

The course offers a comprehensive overview of theoretical approaches and issues within a broader interdisciplinary movement in the humanities concerned with the environment, at the heart of which today lie the questions of the Anthropocene, the climate change crisis, and the concern with the nonhuman. The trajectory of the course will move along different understandings of the entanglement of the natural and the social, together with redefinitions of those terms as such, placing them in their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts with a special emphasis placed on American examples. At the same time, the course will give specific examples of how various theoretical slants may yield different results when it comes to the interpretation of American texts of culture concerned with the environment. Specifically, the topics of the course include, but are not limited to, the following approaches with an attempt to map connections and differences between them: a brief overview of the historical post-Enlightenment approaches to nature and the environment, theories concerned with the Anthropocene and its cognates (Capitalocene, Urbanocene, Novacene, Neganthropocene, etc.); various trends within ecocriticism (feminist eco-criticism, elemental ecocriticism) and animal studies; the Gaia theory; posthumanism and new materialisms (vitalism, object oriented ontology, dark ecology); postmarxist theories of nature, energy humanities and blue humanities, biopoetics and enlivenment theory; geoontology and ontopower, as well as theories of global weirding and complexity.
In this sense, the course will offer case studies that may help students undertake their own research by offering methodological tools and by creating space for the development of research and writing skills together with an attempt at assessing the blind spots of given methods. The course concludes with a longer research paper.

Type of course

elective courses
proseminars

Course coordinators

Karolina Lebek

Learning outcomes

Upon completing this course student:
1. is able to map the different theories and approaches within environmental humanities
2. has the skills to read cultural texts with the use of critical tools introduced by environmental humanities
3. understands the importance of environmental thought in the age of global warming and environmental crises
4. understands the connection between forms of capitalism and environmental crises
5. understands the issues concerned with environmental justice
6. knows and is able to apply a variety of research techniques and methodological approaches for the purposes of writing a longer
research paper.

Assessment criteria

1.Continuous assessment during classes (preparation and participation; brief written responses to concepts and ideas) - 40%,
2.research essay - 60%. (either 15-20 pages or 7-8 pages depending on students overall choice)
Essay grading scale:
100-97% 5!
96-91% 5
90-84% 4+
83-78%
67-60% 3
59-0% 2

Practical placement

None

Bibliography

Selected critical literature:
Wybrana literatura krytyczna:
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
Adamson, J., W.A. Gleason, and D.N. Pellow. Keywords for Environmental Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2016.
Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Kenneth Haltman. Dallas: Dallas
Institute of Humanities & Culture, 2002.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press,
2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
Callison, Candis. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Clark, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, eds. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, eds. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coupe. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2000.
Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Dawson, Ashley. Extinction: A Radical History. New York and London: OR Books, 2016.
DeLoughrey, E., J. Didur, and A. Carrigan, eds. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. New York:
Routledge, 2015.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Towards a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 57 (1) (2019): 21 36.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. Zoologies. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2014.
Dobrin, Sidney I., and Sean Morey, eds. Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.
Egan, M. “Subaltern Environmentalism in the United States: A Historiographic Review.” Environment and History 8 (1) (2002): 21 41.
Elias, Amy J. and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geo-aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2015.
Emmett, Robert S. and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Farrier, David.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020.
Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Gillis, John. “The Blue Humanities.” Humanities 34 (3) (2013). www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the blue humanities.
Hall, M. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London & New York: Verso Books, 2017.
Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017
Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020
Han, Byung-Chul. Capitalism and the Death Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021
Han, Byung-Chul. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Heise, Ursula K., Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, eds. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. New York:
Routledge, 2017.
Heise, Usula K. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Houser, Heather. Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
Irigaray, L. and M. Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
MacGregor, Sherilyn, ed. Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge, 2017.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. New York: Verso, 2016.
Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso, 2018.
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
McNeill, J.R. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016.
Menely, Tobias and Jesse Oak Taylor, eds. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. State College: Penn State
University Press, 2017.
Mentz, Steve. Ocean. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015.
Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Morton, Tim. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Nishime, Leilani and Kim Hester Williams, eds. Racial Ecologies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Oppermann, Serpil and Serenella Iovino, eds. Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. London, New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2017.
Pellow, David Nauguip. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.
Roorda, Eric Paul, ed. The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Lost Spirit of Capitalism: Disbelief and Discredit, 3. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyper-Industrial Epoch. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Trans. Barnaby Norman.
Stiegler, Bernard. States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery, Volume 2: The Catastrophe of the Sensible. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Trans. Barnaby Norman.
Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Stiegler, Bernard. Bifurcate: ‘There Is No Alternative’, edited by Bernard Stiegler with the Internation Collective. London: Open Humanities Press, 2021. Trans. Daniel Ross.
Szeman, Imre, and Boyer, Dominic, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Szeman, Imre. On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015.
Wallace Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane, 2019.
Westling, Louise, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Wolfe,
Cary. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Zalasiewicz, Jan. The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Term 2024Z:

Selected critical literature:
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
Adamson, J., W.A. Gleason, and D.N. Pellow. Keywords for Environmental Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2016.
Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Kenneth Haltman. Dallas: Dallas
Institute of Humanities & Culture, 2002.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press,
2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
Callison, Candis. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Clark, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, eds. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, eds. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Cohen, Margaret. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coupe. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2000.
Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Dawson, Ashley. Extinction: A Radical History. New York and London: OR Books, 2016.
DeLoughrey, E., J. Didur, and A. Carrigan, eds. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. New York:
Routledge, 2015.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Towards a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 57 (1) (2019): 21 36.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. Zoologies. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2014.
Dobrin, Sidney I., and Sean Morey, eds. Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.
Egan, M. “Subaltern Environmentalism in the United States: A Historiographic Review.” Environment and History 8 (1) (2002): 21 41.
Elias, Amy J. and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geo-aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2015.
Emmett, Robert S. and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Farrier, David.
Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020.
Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Gillis, John. “The Blue Humanities.” Humanities 34 (3) (2013). www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the blue humanities.
Hall, M. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011.
Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London & New York: Verso Books, 2017.
Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017
Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020
Han, Byung-Chul. Capitalism and the Death Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021
Han, Byung-Chul. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Heise, Ursula K., Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, eds. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. New York:
Routledge, 2017.
Heise, Usula K. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Houser, Heather. Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.
Irigaray, L. and M. Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
MacGregor, Sherilyn, ed. Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge, 2017.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. New York: Verso, 2016.
Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso, 2018.
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
McNeill, J.R. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016.
Menely, Tobias and Jesse Oak Taylor, eds. Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times. State College: Penn State
University Press, 2017.
Mentz, Steve. Ocean. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011.
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015.
Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Morton, Tim. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Nishime, Leilani and Kim Hester Williams, eds. Racial Ecologies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Oppermann, Serpil and Serenella Iovino, eds. Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. London, New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2017.
Pellow, David Nauguip. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.
Roorda, Eric Paul, ed. The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Additional information

Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system:

Description of 4219-RS279 in USOSweb