ENGL 502A

Studies in Criticism (3 credits)

Instructor: Laurie Ricou
Section: 001
Term: 2

Ecocriticism and the Shapes of Habitat (Ricou)

The shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local.
-- Clifford Geertz

Sue Wheeler’s poem “Understory” begins in the infiniteness of the infinitive: “To walk out of the field guide / and listen.  To wait / for the world to approach with its dapple and hands.”  Don McKay, in Vis a Vis writes about the state of mind he calls poetic attention : “ Even after linguistic composition has begun, and the air is thick with the problematics of reference, this kind of knowing remains in touch with perception, . . . will keep coming back to the trail.”  Wheeler and McKay might be trying to articulate the prompts for this course.  It hopes to approach, in the way of the infinitive, some verbal notion not yet subject-ed, not yet time-ed.  And although we and it are made of language, it wants to listen to what the world outside of (human) language systems might be saying.

So, although “Habitat Studies” has had several iterations since 1999, this course is still very much an experiment in ecocriticism.  Because I remain convinced that the best way to encounter this relatively new field of English studies is by leaving English studies behind, by beginning with the sustained study of a species of flora or fauna, one that surprises for having been randomly selected, not chosen on the basis of whatever preconception.  Each participant will, from day one, examine a particular species and its habitat--in the fullest sense--in a project intended to push literary research into anthropology and ethnography, folk music, theatre, economic, geographical and political history, film and the visual arts.  But surely, and most essentially, into the sciences: into botany and zoology, lichenology and entomology, especially into ecology.

Yet surely this is also a course for those who have been transformed and transfixed by literature and by great teachers of literature. The idea is not to abandon your love of poetry. Indeed you must be ready to walk out and listen—somewhere the other is speaking.  I want you to break away from what you thought literary study was, lose yourself, and then find your way back by becoming poet.

Texts:
(as of December 2007; keep checking back.)

I may assign one or two texts for purchase, or a slim course pak. But, the principal texts in the course will be the ones the participants discover and introduce to the group in the course of their research.  The texts in the room are mostly those that the participants locate and share.  They will not be assigned necessarily, but if you work hard, you will get a good dose of the consensus primary texts in the emerging field of ecocriticism.