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Title of the Course: IKA 6/718 Culture and the Environment
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Serpil OPPERMANN
Aim: This graduate course will provide students with a broad foundation in contemporary ecocritical/eco-cultural studies and the Environmental Humanities. The course offers an advanced critical outlook on the current ideas about human and nonhuman relationships, nature and culture, and how their ecological interactions are articulated and contested in what came to be known as naturecultures. The major focus of the course will be on a broad range of ecocritical theories which foreground the interactions between human and nonhuman environments, social and environmental justice issues in relation to climate change and other ecological problems, feminist ecocritical ideas, and the relations between bodies and the environments in the age of the Anthropocene. Students will develop and articulate their own critical methodologies, using the models we discuss in class and branching off in directions of their own choice. The general aim of the course is to create environmental awareness and familiarize the students with pressing ecological problems that are also cultural problems. This course at large addresses the question posed by Cheryll Glotfelty: “How then can we contribute to environmental restoration, not just in our spare time, but from within our capacity as professors of literature?” Of course here we add: “as students of cultural studies and literature.”
