Graduate students Nicole Chambers and April McGinnis are exploring the rich terrain of environmental literature and ecocritical scholarship. Read along with them—or just listen in! You can find their reading lists on their website at ecolitpodcast.wordpress.com.
A man’s struggle to face social injustice and then social isolation in the midst of a global pandemic…while it sounds like a human interest piece in current events, this is a story about the future (set at the turn of the 22nd century) written by a 19th-century novelist. In the first episode of our second season—and our first virtual recording session—we read this sibylline science fiction through the 21st-century lenses of human environment and our need to connect with it.
Texts discussed in this episode: Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Stacy Alaimo) and The Last Man (Mary Shelley)
0:33 - Introduction
2:42 - The Natural Resource
16:38 - The Literary Min(e)d
45:16 - Finding Footholds
59:23 - Conclusion
13 Oct 2019
A Survey of Season One
This episode, we retrace our steps and return to some of our favorite moments in Season One of the EcoLit Project: our growing awareness of women written about with Botanic language; the dualisms of nature and culture dividing the field; and the alternative path through it that the outside characters show us. Join us this fall as we begin a new season, from elementary reading to the elements of Ecocriticism.
19 Aug 2019
Do Ecocritics Dream of Natural Sheep?
From Golden-Age Arcadia to a future filled with Androids, we have always dreamed of building a better version of Nature: our world and ourselves. But the dark ecology of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reveals that not all upgrades are so different or so improved as we'd like to imagine. In this episode, we enter into his and Timothy Morton’s world, an Ecology Without Nature, where we must learn to love and live with other "unnatural" living things: the dust, the fly, the preying mantis, and the electric things.
5 Jul 2019
The Importance of Being Urban
Does eco-criticism always need to be so serious? Not according to Oscar Wilde, who manages to cultivate some levity in this earnest literary field. In this episode, we “Bunbury” our way through country, city, summer, and a Trivial Comedy for Serious People.
Texts discussed in this episode:
The Country and the City (Raymond Williams)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)
Music credit: 'Planets' by Gustav Holst
Sound excerpt: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (LibriVox: https://librivox.org/the-importance-of-being-earnest-version-3-by-oscar-wilde/)
18 May 2019
The Garden in the Machine
In this episode, we use Leo Marx's time machine to travel through the garden -- a natural history spanning the brave new world of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest,' the mines and fields of the Victorian novel, the American wilderness (and our acts and actions there) -- toward a post-pastoral future that is yet to come.
Texts discussed in this episode:
The Machine in the Garden (Leo Marx)
Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
6 Apr 2019
Mountain Mine
April studies mountains, Nicole studies mines. In this episode, we journey through the landscapes of poetry: the mines of Coalbrookdale, the mountains of Mont Blanc, and the Metaphors We Live By. Accompanied by the symphonic Planets of Gustav Holst, we seek to map these distant realms to our own planet earth.
Texts discussed in this episode:
Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson)
“To Colebrookdale” (Anna Seward)
“Mont Blanc” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
1 Mar 2019
Ground Zero
In our pilot episode, we introduce the Eco Lit project, ourselves, and where we’re heading with this podcast.
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