Semester.ly

Johns Hopkins University | AS.213.607

Critical Ecologies of Literary Modernism

0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

(-1)

Critical Ecologies of Literary Modernism will trace the origins of ecocritical literary modernism. Beginning with Hölderlin and Nietzsche, who most radically identified the source of estrangement from nature in human cognition itself, we will explore how innovations in conceiving human cognition and practice play out ecologically in the work of German modernists Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Robert Musil, and Bertoldt Brecht, as well as in the modernist works of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Françis Ponge and Albert Camus. Grounded in modern German thought and extending across multiple literary modernisms, we will see that what have been taken as the subjective or aestheticized concerns of modernist writing can be recognized as critical ecologies of human cognition and practice, while exposing modernist anxiety about the technological advances of human habitats, the expanse of urbanization, the reach of human intervention in nature, and the underlying animality within human thinking and perception. These works may also initiate forms of imagined intimacy with nature and non-human life in modernist works.

No Course Evaluations found