Exam 4 Lit and Class Notes Flashcards
Antihumanism (Jeffers) ?
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Eco-criticism
- Traced back to British Romanticism, 1780-1830 with poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley
- Also traced to American Romanticism 1820-1865 with writers like Thoreau and Dickinson
- Finally evolved into Nature Writing with writers like Dillard and Thoreau
- looking at non-obvious texts to uncover ecological analysis
- our relationship to nature isn’t just about gathering data, but about feelings
- began with explicitly ecological works
Environmental Unconscious (Buell, 2009)
a knowledge of interconnectedness or coexistence suggested in a text
Who said “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and what did they mean by it?
- Percy Shelley
- Poets shape the world in quiet ways by helping us think differently
- poetry strengthens the “organ” that makes us moral and gives us empathy; it strengthens the capacity to sympathize/empathize with things different from ourselves
Thinking Like A Mountain (Aldo Leopold)
- Only the mountain can “think” at the appropriate scale and complexity to understand the dynamic balance of interdependent populations necessary to sustain an ecosystem
- encourages us to think ecologically about how self interest must be regulated by empathy, reciprocity, synergy, and cooperation at higher levels of scale
Being at Home in the World
Literature helps us inhabit the world; it reorients us in nature; nature is our home
Climate Change Narratives
sci-fi/speculative fiction
Posthumanism
- criticizes humanism
- humans are part of nature
- began in the British Romantic period when people began to challenge the assumption that humans are separate from nature
Who wrote Ministry for the Future and when was it published?
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020
What did Kim Stanley Robinson say about science fiction?
It is the realism of our time; i.e., science fiction can address contemporary issues that realism cant
What is Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future” about?
- the effects of global warming and a wet bulb event
- follows Frank May, and aid worker and the only survivor of the wet bulb event in India, and Mary Murphy the director of the Ministry for the Future
- Frank May = human experience and physical horror
- Mary Murphy = geopolitics
What is a wet bulb event?
when temperature and humidity reach a point where humans cannot sweat to cool themselves; essentially boiling them in their own skin
What is Microcosmos (1996)
- the first nature documentary of its kind
- snails mating and mosquito birth
What does it mean to say “The Anthropocene is to Natural Science what Cinema is to Human Culture” ? (Fay, 2018)
- it shapes our experience and culture profoundly
- it shapes popular consciousness
Ecocinematic viewing
active viewing; looking at the image and how its been constructed; analyzing mainstream films through the lens of ecological critique in order to reflect on personal experience
When did nature documentaries emerge?
mid 20th century
Honeyland (2019)
- Documentary directed by Kotevska and Stefanov
- narrates the life of Hatidze Muratova; an apiarist
- addressing bees with ecostewardship
- her knowledge is stolen by a man who exhausts wild bee hives
The Silent World (1956)
- Documentary directed by Jacques Cousteau
- one of the first works of underwater cinematography using submersible cameras
- the history of image capture is a history of environmental degradation
What does cinema foreground? why is this helpful from an environmental standpoint?
- cinema foregrounds the multi-dimensionality of deep time
- it gives us access to space and perspectives we don’t normally see
Ecocinema
- how different genres of film approach the environment
- the role of cinema in making audiences act
- reinforce/contest how we view nature
- how sustainable is the medium?
Ecocinema (Sheld Lu, 2019)
- cinema with an ecological consciousness
- articulates the relationship between human beings and the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric POV
- form and content
Ecocinema (Willoquet, 2010)
- a wider range of films that depict humans in the environment (or just the environment) without explicit activist messages
- way of seeing
Ecocinema Studies (Willoquet, 2010)
approaches film broadly to understand how visual representations position nature through the camera frame, editing process, and audiences’ reception of the film
Cinema Verité
involves a participatory style of ethnographic filmmaking focused on the self-revelation of a film’s subject
