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Capstone Seminar Workshop
01:195:497 CAPSTONE SEMINAR WORKSHOP (1) Assessment of the undergraduate experience as a major in
comparative literature. Debate around the present state of the discipline. Series of workshops intended to explore
professional and academic careers, including preparation for graduate school and grant writing.� Open to
comparative literature seniors only.
This course is offered in the spring semester, and is mandatory for all graduating seniors (unless a senior
is writing an Honors Thesis, which in itself becomes the assessment tool). The goal of the seminar is to
assess the CompLit Learning Goals.
Comparative Literature Learning Goals
Students will:
 Demonstrate familiarity with a variety of world literatures as well as methods of studying
literature and culture across national and linguistic boundaries and evaluate the nature,
function and value of literature from a global perspective.
 Demonstrate critical reasoning and research skills; design and conduct research in an individual
field of concentration (such as literary theory, women's literature, post colonial studies,
literature and film, etc); analyze a specific body of research and write a clear and well developed
paper or project about a topic related to more than one literary and cultural tradition.
 Demonstrate competency in one foreign language and at least a basic knowledge of the
literature written in that language.
In concrete terms, all this means:
1. The students are asked to carry out a research project that will produce a 15 -20 page paper
with a comparative approach.
2. We will meet every other week, at a time to be decided according to our schedules in our first
meeting on Week 1.
3. The approach of the paper will be informed by the theme selected that spring semester either
for the Comparative Literature in Dialogue Conference, or the graduate student conference.
4. After reviewing fundamental theoretical readings related to that theme, the students will select
a corpus of texts or films (three to five items) representative of their field of specialization
(Special Focus of their Major), and elaborate a proposal stating the hypothesis they expect to
explore in that body of work.
5. There will be a schedule for submitting to the group different versions of the paper’s draft for
peer review and collaboration.
6. The final paper will be assessed following a rubric based on the program’s learning goals.
Theme for Spring 2011: Cross-Cultural Ecocriticism
The graduate seminar Comparative Literature in Dialogue is our signature graduate course
devoted to the exploration of a topic of current interest with the participation of a visiting scholar, who
teaches a three-day mini-course, caped by the celebration of a one-day conference open to the
university community. In the past, we have held the following Comp. Lit. in Dialogue Conferences:
“TRANSLATION 3 (Culture • Institutions • Theory),” on April of 2008; and “Postcolonialities,” on April of
2009.
For spring 2011, Comparative Literature in Dialogue will address new developments in the field
of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism names the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of
humans’ interactions with natural environments, and with non-human species in literature, film, and in
other media.
Only since the early 1990s, mainstream literary and cultural studies have re-engaged with old
questions revivified ironically by 20th-century environmental crises. The relationship of nature to society
has been always present in literatures across the world, and criticism has always indeed focused on it.
However, do contemporary environmental theories, crises, and politics require from literary and cultural
studies diversifying the assumptions, concepts, and interpretations that usually framed their study of
nature and society? Have past and current world literatures addressed environmental crises, and
thought positions that can illuminate our debates on ecology, environmentalism and post-humanism?
Can we re-think the relationship between “texts” and their social/natural environment?
Originally developed within the American and English academies, ecocriticism has been accused
of exhibiting a pronounced tendency towards solipsism and at times, ethnocentrism, in its primary focus
on English and American national literary traditions and ecologies. In the last decade, as boom of
environmentalisms throughout the world are addressing local and global problems, ecocriticism has
witnessed the development of new approaches that transcend national, ethnic, linguistic, and gender
boundaries.
Tentative Schedule
Week 1
Week 2 Meeting
Week 3
Week 4 Meeting
Weeks 5 and 6
Week 7
Week 8 Meeting
Theoretical readings (Heise, Mortimer-Sandilands, Morton, Nixon, and others)
Theoretical readings (Heise, Mortimer-Sandilands, Morton, Nixon, and others)
Theoretical readings (Heise, Mortimer-Sandilands, Morton, Nixon, and others)
Theoretical readings (Heise, Mortimer-Sandilands, Morton, Nixon, and others)
Mini-course: “Last Birds, Lost Dogs, and Listed Species: Biodiversity and the
Cultural Imagination,” conducted by Prof. Ursula Heise, from Stanford
University.
It will take place on
Wednesday February 16th,
Monday February 21st, and
Wednesday February 23rd, 2011;
2:00-4:00 pm. at the Pane Seminar Room. Alexander Library, CAC.
Conference “Cross-Cultural Ecocriticism(s): Waves and Undertows.” The
conference will take place on February 25th, 2011, from 9:00 am. to 5:00 pm. at
the Teleconference Lecture Hall, in Alexander Library.
Turn in Proposal
Peer review of proposals
Week 9
Draft
Week 10 Meeting
Draft
Week 11
Draft
Week 12 Meeting
Peer review of drafts
Week 13
Paper
Week 14
Paper
Exam Week Turn in final paper
The Conference “Cross-Cultural Ecocriticism(s); Waves and Undertows”
The conference will reflect on the gains and shortcomings of the so-called “third wave
ecocriticism,” or the current rise of approaches which transcends national and ethnic boundaries and
compares the cultural aspects of the human-nature interaction across cultures. More specifically, the
conference will focus on the rise of postcolonial ecocriticism, the impact of new varieties of
ecofeminisms and popular environmentalisms (including the environmental justice movement)
throughout the world in literature and film; and the contributions and challenges posed by another
emergent field: critical animal studies. As ecocriticism spreads across cultural traditions, it is restating
the need for expanding further its object of study to new forms of textuality and discourse in different
media. Overall, therefore, the conference will explore too current rethinking of environmental
aesthetics and ecological thought in the Humanities.
Four distinguished scholars who in recent times have opened or advanced new directions in
these areas have agreed to join us for the conference.
Prof. Rob Nixon. Rachel Carson Professor of English, U of Wisconsin. “Ecologies of the
Aftermath.” A leading scholar on environmentalism in the global South, he is affiliated with the Center
for Culture, History and Environment; the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies; Border and
Transcultural Studies; and African Studies. Prof. Nixon is a past recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, a
MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellowship, and an NEH. Author of Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP, 2010), Prof. Nixon is a frequent contributor to The New York
Times, and his writings have appeared too in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of
Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian, and elsewhere.
Prof. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands. Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture, York
U). [On British Columbia lesbian novelist/essayist/activist Jane Rule]. A most provocative thinker on
issues of sexuality, gender and environments, Prof. Sandilands has been praised for introducing her
notion of “queer ecologies” in ecocriticism, and creative environmental writing. She has recently edited
(with Bruce Erickson) Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics and Desire (Indiana UP, 2010), a collection
that culminates almost a decade of research in this field, and consistently supported by grants from the
SSHRC, and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Innovation Trust, Infrastructure Grant.
Prof. Timothy Morton. Professor of Literature and Environment, UC Davis. “Hyperobjects.” An
expert on British Romanticism, particularly an authority on Percy Shelley, Prof. Morton has performed
an outstanding critique of ecocriticism itself by revisiting its sources in Romanticism, and drawing from it
a new way of understanding environmental aesthetics that resonates well with current Continental
philosophy on the idea of ecology, and with environmentalism in other world literatures. He is the
author of Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard UP, 2007), and The
Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010).
Prof. Ursula Heise. Director, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford U. TBA. She is also a
member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society, and Affiliated
Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Prof. Heise is the author of Sense of Place and Sense
of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008). As the incoming President of
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), she is in fact focusing the Ninth
ASLE Biennial Conference (June 22-26, 2011) on the theme of "Species, Space and the Imagination of the
Global."
Our four speakers will each deliver a 30-minute lecture followed by a Q/A period. Four
moderators and four respondents, colleagues at Rutgers University from a diversity of departments, will
contribute to the dialogue as well; a roundtable discussion with all the speakers, led by Prof. Marcone,
will conclude the event.