WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2020-2021       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Special Topics: Ecopoetics - Experimental Poetry in the Anthropocene

ENGL 340
Spring 2021 not offered
Crosslisting: ENVS 330
Course Cluster and Certificates: Sustainability and Environmental Justice

How do poets speak for and from a world in flux and crisis? How do poets register and attempt to restore the degradation of the planet through language? How might altering the boundaries of conventional language use--through poetry--alter the bounds of conventional thinking and behaving, thus leading to more engaged and sustainable modes of living? This course, in part, will serve as a tour of contemporary ecopoets invested in looking at and caring for the current state of our planet through poetry. We will read poems that reflect the most critical environmental concerns of our time and we will learn to see how these poems resist closure and are instead guided by experimentation, exploration, and interrogation in an attempt at reorienting our attention and intention as inheritors of this planet.
This is a workshop for students committed to developing an understanding of ecopoetry's place in the more-than-literary world, as well as developing a personal ecopoetics from which to write, read, and live. Students will choose an environmental topic to research and write in service of for the semester and, by the end of the semester, each student will have written a project-centered collection of ecopoems. There will be bi-weekly presentations on the poetry collections we read, in-class writing experiments, and intensive workshops of one another's work. The class will culminate in an ecobook arts project and reflective essay.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: (ENGL216 AND ENGL336) OR ENGL337
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Creative W)(ENVS-MN)(ENVS)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459