ALL381 - Reading the End of Nature

Unit details

Note: You are seeing the 2019 view of this unit information. These details may no longer be current. [Go to the current version]
Year:2019 unit information
Enrolment modes:

Trimester 1: Burwood (Melbourne), Waurn Ponds (Geelong), Cloud (online)

Trimester 3: Burwood (Melbourne), Cloud (online) - No longer offerd at Burwood in Trimester 3, offered Cloud (online) only

Credit point(s):1
EFTSL value:0.125
Trimester 1 Unit Chair:

Emily Potter

Trimester 3 Unit Chair:

Emily Potter

Prerequisite:

One Literary Studies unit at second year level

Corequisite:

Nil

Incompatible with:

Nil

Scheduled learning activities - campus:

1 x recorded online class per week, 1 x 2-hour seminar per week

Scheduled learning activities - cloud (online):

Online independent and collaborative learning activities including: 1 x recorded online class per week plus online discussion (equivalent 2 hours) per week

Note:

Note: Previously called "Literary Ecologies: (Re)Imagining Our Place in the World"

Content

This unit responds to the current environmental crisis to critically consider the role of literature in both producing and responding to ‘the end of nature’. This ending relates to ways of seeing, thinking and writing about nature that have reached their historical limit and can no longer be sustained. Ranging across themes such as ‘the pastoral’, ‘the disaster’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘animals’ and ‘the post-human’, the unit encourages students to critically consider these and other concepts as historically and culturally contingent, and to understand the ways in which literary texts – including fiction, non-fiction and film across a range of genres – generate, contest and perform these concepts. Ultimately, students will be asked to reflect on what reading at the end nature might mean outside of the text, in a world facing what Swedish student activist Greta Thunberg calls ‘climate breakdown’, and how reading and political action might go hand in hand.

Assessment

Assessment 1: (Individual) - Essay (1500 words or equivalent) - 40%

Assessment 2 (Individual) - Essay (2000 words or equivalent) - 50%

Assessment 3 (Group 4-5 participants) - Class/Online Exercise (500 word or equivalent) - 10%

Unit Fee Information

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