Problems in American Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Ziser, Michael
CRN: 23413
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: Remote Instruction
Description
CATASTROPHE: Unnatural Disasters in History, Literature, and the Environmental Humanities
This seminar--co-taught with Louis Warren of the history department--will take as its starting point a critical approach to the framing of fire, flood, pestilence, and other environmental events as "natural disasters." To what extent are such events the results of social inequities rather than a hostile environment? In what ways do they reveal environmental assumptions and their entanglement with social hierarchies? Can other "events" or social processes such as poverty and climate change be better understood as to some degree both social and environmental? Proceeding through a set of general theoretical frameworks and a series of historical case studies, we will work to integrate perspectives from the arts and humanities into complex representations of more-than-natural precarity. Students from all humanities, social sciences, and relevant scientific disciplines welcome!
Grading
Readings, discussion, final paper.
Texts
Dancing With Disaster, Kate Rigby
Plutopia, Kate Brown
Seismic City, Joanna Dyl
Pox Americana, Elizabeth Fenn
Acts of God, Ted Steinberg
Dust Bowl, Donald Worster
Katrina: A History, Andrew Horwitz
Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg
In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, Mark Carey
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon