ENGLISH 3265 - COURSE CONTENT

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Week 1 – Introduction: From Capitalism to Catastrophe

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Reading(s):

• Malm, “Theory for the Warming Condition” inThe Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World

• VID: Bartlett, “Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy”

• OPT FILM: Orlowski, Chasing Coral

• OPT: Moynihan, “How Humanity Came to Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline”

• T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1925)

 

Week 2 – Naturalism in Early Modernity I: 17th Century Rationalism

 

Reading(s):

• Spinoza, "Part 1: Concerning God" in Ethics, Spinoza: Complete Works, 217-243.

• OPT: Morgan, "Introduction" in Spinoza: Complete Works, ix-xvi.

 

Week 3 – Naturalism in Early Modernity II: Settler Romanticism

 

Reading(s):

• LIT: Emerson, Nature (selections) (1836)

• FILM: Anderson,There Will Be Blood (2007)

 

Week 4 – Nature-Culture I

 

Reading(s):

• LIT: André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs (selections)

• OPT: Shah, "The Animals Are Talking. Here's What They're Saying"

• OPT: Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man", 62-75

• OPT: Le Guin, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds", in The Compass Rose, 7-16

• OPT: 

 

Week 5 – Nature-Culture II

 

Reading(s):

• VID: Primer, “Simulating Natural Selection”

• Deleuze and Guattari, “The Refrain” in A Thousand Plateaus

 

Week 6 – Nature-Culture III

 

Reading(s):

• Tomlinson, “The Limits of Transspeciesism” in The Machines of Evolution and the
  Scope of Meaning

• Tomlinson, "The Third Algorithm"

• Uexküll, Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 44-63.

• Agamben, "Umwelt" in The Open

 

Week 7 – Reading Week, NO CLASS

 

Week 8 – Before, During and After the Human Animal (I)

 

Reading(s):

• Deacon, “Symbolic Origins” in The Symbolic Species

• OPT: Gayon, “Sexual selection: Another Darwinian process”

 

Week 9 – Before, During, and After the Human Animal (II)

 

Reading(s):

• Tomasello, “Ancient Humans as Socially Normative Agents” in The Evolution of Agency.

• OPT: Tomlinson, “Semiotic Epicycles and Emergent Thresholds in Human Evolution” in Glass Bead

 

Week 10 – Before and After the Human Animal (III)

 

Reading(s):

• Kay Anderson, “‘The Beast Within’: Race, Humanity, and Animality” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

• OPT: Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”

 

Week 11 – Before and After the Human Animal (IV)

 

Reading(s):

• ​Donna J. Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”

• TV: “End Sinister” in Æon Flux 

• OPT FILM: Cronenberg, eXistenZ (1999)

 

Week 12 – Extinction and Ecology I

 

Reading(s):

• Brassier, “Solar Catastrophe” in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

• Thomas Moynihan “Existential Risk & Human Extinction: An Intellectual History”

 

Week 13 – Extinction and Ecology II

 

Reading(s):

• Fikret Berkes, “Holism of Indigenous Knowledge, Complex Systems, and Fuzzy Logic” in Sacred Ecology (2018)

• Gregory Cajete, "A Sense of Place" in Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (2000)

• OPT FILM: Reichardt, Night Moves (2013)

 

Week 14 – Extinction and Ecology III

 

Reading(s):

• FILM: McPherson, Endgame (2000)

• LIT: Beckett, Endgame