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Writing the Anthropocene ENGL 30124 – TB1 2021-22
Summative Essay questions
For this essay, you should answer ONE of the below questions
You may also write your own question for this assessment, but I must approve your chosen question before you can write on it. Please book an office hour with me *in good time* before the assessment due date if you would like to write your own question.
1. ‘[Rachel] Carson had almost nothing to say directly about empire, class, and race, yet her work speaks powerfully to the environmentalism of the poor because she was passionately concerned with the complicity of the military industrial complex in disguising toxicity, both physically and rhetorically.’ (Rob Nixon, Slow Violence)
Discuss either i) the impact of Carson’s work on another writer or writers Or ii) the relation between nature writing and ‘the environmentalism of the poor’
2. ‘To appreciate grass, you must lie down in grass.’ (Louise Erdrich, ‘Big Grass’)
Discuss, in two or more texts, the necessity to ecological awareness of sensory
experience.
3. ‘My genetic memory of ancestors hunted down and preyed upon in rural settings counters my fervent hopes of finding peace in the wilderness. Instead of the solace and comfort I seek, I imagine myself in the country as my forebears were – exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected – a target of cruelty and hate.’ (Evelyn White, ‘Black Women and the Wilderness’)
In two or more texts, discuss the portrayal of exclusion from ‘the country’ or ‘the wilderness’
4. ‘A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it. The spirit may differ from the spirit we know in animals or plants or in ourselves. In the end we all originate from the depths of the earth. Perhaps this is how all beings share in the spirit of the Creator. We do not know.’ (Leslie Marmon Silko, ‘Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination’) Using two or more texts, discuss the ecological perspective of Native American writing.
5. “Scientific disputes continue to be conducted in literature, mostly in journals of
science and sometimes in the wider media. These disputes are never ‘purely’ scientific; they are always language-based processes” (Charlotte Sleigh)
Explore how writers have navigated the relationship between literature and science in writing about Nature, with reference to two or more texts.
6. ‘The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been startled out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Neither of us could bear to look away. Its face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man. I moved. I could not help it. And the owl suddenly turned it head, shuffled along the branch as though cringing, and flew softly away into the wood. (J. A. Baker, The Peregrine)
Consider the portrayal of encounters with non-human animals in two or more texts.
7. ‘Anthropocentrism is a pitfall of the Anthropocene, when the emphasis is on
the first part of the neologism, the Anthropos. In particular, the danger is that real lives are subsumed by humanity thought in the abstract, a flattened worldview that disregards the fact that the “we” of the Anthropocene is profoundly conflicted, composed of extremely mismatched orders of culpability and exposure. The experience of the Anthropocene is defined by privilege, marked by structural inequalities and huge disparities, in both consumption patterns and the capacity to ride out the consequences of a changing climate.’ (David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics)
Consider how one or more writers respond to or address the pitfalls of the term “Anthropocene”.
8. ‘To the degree to which nature writing and nature poems, for instance, appeal to or invoke reader associations with the pastoral and the idyll, they take the reader out of time, either nostalgically or mythically. […] The appeal to the idyll is highly contradictory and needs to be understood as such. On the one hand, it fruitfully reasserts an organic and holistic relationship of humanity and the more-than-human that needs to be revitalized in the increasingly de-natured life of urban consumerism. On the other hand, the carrying away of the reader from the present may lessen the sense of crisis and decrease feelings of need for engagement with the environmental issues of the day (Patrick Murphy, ‘Dialoguing with Bakhtin’)
Does the nature writing you have been reading share and / or respond to the contradictory qualities of pastoral?
9. ‘As late as the 1950s, the myth of human redemption through technology was still alive and active in the minds of Americans, western and eastern alike. […] Today [1993] the attitudes of Americans have begun to change perceptibly [….] It is no longer clear that the domination of nature […] carries any promise of mankind’s moral redemption.’ (Donald Worster, ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Water’)
Either i) consider the role of technology in two or more texts
Or ii) consider how writers reflect – or perhaps dispute – Worsters’s perception of a
change of attitudes towards technology
10. ‘Amid the expanding lexicon of environmental catastrophe, it is no surprise
that there are new words for fear. After all, to pay attention to what is happening to the world, and to imagine what might come next, is to be afraid. […] ‘Eco-anxiety’, some call it – a term that has, at least, the benefit of lucidity. ‘Solastalgia’, others say – which does not. These words fix a label to the chronic alarm that, increasingly, many feel. Like a lepidopterist’s pin, they fasten that feeling to the page. Now, they seem to say, we know what we are dealing with. Now we understand. (Malachy Tallack, ‘What we Talk about when we Talk about Solastalgia’)
Write either i) about writerly responses to the fear produced by ‘what is happening in the world’
Or ii) about the processes of denial depicted by and present within literary work about the environmental crisis
11. ‘[Forrest] Gander describes poetry as something that can “tear” us “awake” (A Faithful Existence 45) arousing a state of embodied attentiveness to non-human presence, but also as something that cultivates a tolerance for “silence, an almost religious gesture of openness”’ (Louise Economides, The Ecology of Wonder)
Using any of the elements of this quotation, discuss the qualities and effect of one or more of the poets you have been reading on this unit.
