Rice Clases Today

ENGL300

Practices in Literary Study

Professor Timothy Morton

01:00PM - 02:15PM TR BKH 102

ENGL459

Literature and Ecology: Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

Spring 2013

4:00PM–5:15PM TR BKH 229

Professor Timothy Morton

In the late eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust, a layer that is now detectable in Arctic ice and in deep lakes. There thus begun what geology now calls the Anthropocene.

The literary period from the eighteenth century, though long, contains some remarkable similarities both in terms of content and in terms of form, similarities that we can now study under the aegis of the term Anthropocene.

In addition to investigating how literatures in English tackle (or not) the Anthropocene, this capstone seminar will be exploring the ways in which literary criticism and theory, and philosophy more generally, has (and has not) addressed the topic of human intervention in ecological and geological reality.