Reading Prompts for November 10: Nuno Marques on air, breath, and Reilly

Nuno Marques, whom you may explore in his website here, says: we will read and discuss excerpts of Reilly’s Styrofoam as an atmospheric poem. 

3 questions before class:

what for you is the atmosphere?
can you point out aesthetic and the material dimensions of the atmosphere?
 - and as Reilly would ask - how to live in the tension between loving plastic and plasticity and knowing its environmental impact?

During our discussions we will have in the back of our minds the challenge of how to  do an ecocritique considering the body as a vector of relations between the cultural and environmental dimensions and not as an object were thought is imposed upon. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to this course (Topics on North-American Studies: Ecopoetics of Alterity / Forms of Environmental Justice

Image
  We will study ecology, poetics, others, and kin(d), and more... For now, as you read Donna Haraway's "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin" (2015), start researching, and (dis)entangling some concepts! Also, take 13 min to watch  this video  . The first writing prompt, as this is a processual course, is for you to dare share some of your notes (marginalia to Haraway's text or/and your impressions on the video), using the comment box,  in order to kickstart a class discussion.
Read more

For the class of September 27th: The Environmental Imagination of Thoreau's Walden (and Emerson's Nature)

Image
 These are the reading prompts for you to comment on the texts for this week (with lovely pic of Margarida in Walden pond at the bottom!). You can choose one of the questions, or weave more than one into a commentary. 1.Compare Gary Snyder's "Wave" with Thoreau's "Walden" (poem). Which of them seems more eccentric? Why? 2.  Lawrence Buell, in the intro to  The Environmental Imagination  (1999), refers to "literature's capacity for articulating the non-human environment" (10). Do Emerson and (or) Thoreau achieve these goals? In what (different) ways? 3.. Buell also posits, in pp. 7-8, four ingredients that should comprise the more ecocentric texts... Can you pick up from the  Walden  excerpts parts that exemplify such ingredients, and briefly analyse them? 4. Write a short text analysis of the passage, on pp. 2127-28, that begins "The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high" and ends with "we may turn over a new leaf a...
Read more

Reading prompts for the class of October 25

Image
  1. Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself. (..). That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics…The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation  (Edouard Glissan, Poetics of Relation , trans. Betsy Wing, 1997 [1990],   18) Both Sylvia Plath's "The Elm" and Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head" are complicated poems. They seem to aim at reaching "an-other's language", or speaking "through the other", but they also preclude the possibility of easy/direct relations. In what ways does the use of language in these poems thwart identitary representation? What effort do they place on the reader? 2.   How can Steve Mentz's theoretical approach to the O...
Read more