EN 639

Natures Past & Eco Futures

This course considers some of the ways that recent Canadian writing engages with environmentalist concerns related to phenomena such as pollution, extinction, resource politics, and climate change. Our reading of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry is informed by current approaches drawn from the environmental humanities, and covers such topics as environmental justice, human-animal interaction, slow violence, the Anthropocene, and the relationship between local and global environmental problems. We also consider questions of language and form, considering how language becomes a field of ecological relations and the literary work constitutes an environment that responds to the physical world while also being a world unto itself. Among the writers whose works may be studied are Don McKay, Jeannette Armstrong, Marie Clements, André Alexis, Warren Cariou, Adam Dickinson, and Douglas Coupland.