581 E SEMINAR LITERARY THEORY, Markley. W 1-2:50
TOPIC: Literature, Science and Ecology: Contested Pasts, Alternative Futures
This seminar will offer students the opportunity to read some essential works by recent theorists in the post- or cross-disciplinary field called (variously) Literature and Science, science studies, or the cultural study of science. It is intended to allow students to explore the complex relationships that link and divide different disciplines and disciplinary modes of inquiry, and it is also intended to serve as a heuristic means to foster seminar papers or (longer writing projects) that investigate some of these relationships. Because we will consider a variety of theoretical approaches and texts, the seminar will give each student the opportunity to write a long paper on a period, literary text or texts, or theoretical problem of his or her choice. No specialized knowledge of mathematics and science is required, and there will be no pop quizzes on partial differential equations.

The seminar will address four overlapping areas of inquiry: 1) the theory and practice of postdisciplinary inquiry; 2) human biology, with a particular emphasis on gender and race; 3) ecology and constructions of nature; and 4) technoculture and new media. During the opening few weeks of the seminar, we will read theorists (some represented by key articles rather than full-length studies) nominally affiliated with a range of traditional disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and biology) but who spend much of their time and energy calling into questions the very bases of disciplinary thought: Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Richard Lewontin. The section on biology will include works by Stephen Jay Gould, Nancy Stepan, Haraway (again), and science fiction by Octavia Butler to explore the ways in which the practice of science has both structured and been structured by the ideological predispositions about race and gender that characterize a Eurocentric modernity. The section on ecology will examine the different ways in which humankind’s relationship to the natural world has been figured before and after the industrial revolution. After reading Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, we will discuss poems by Aphra Behn, Andrew Maravell, and Oliver Goldsmith; prose by John Locke and (it’s inevitable) by Henry David Thoreau; and Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction. These texts will allow students to explore two fundamental and often antagonistic responses to “Nature”: the Baconian desire to master the world by exploiting its resources and developing ever-more sophisticated technologies to raise or maintain living standards and the wish to return to a golden age in which human desires and natural resources exist in what we now call ecological balance. The final weeks of the seminar will be devoted to technoculture and new media, and we will read works by Marshall McLuhan, Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin, and Katherine Hayles, among others. Rather than a grand synthesis, we will conclude by exploring the dialectical relationship between new media and the discourses of the natural world.