What Is Ecocriticism & Why Does It Matter to Humanities and Social Sciences Teachers? - Scott Slovic

“Decolonizing the Earth: Ecocritical Pedagogy” Talk Series, talk #1 -- Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA
“What Is Ecocriticism and Why Does It Matter to Humanities and Social Sciences Teachers?” -- Prof. Scott Slovic, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho
Moderated by Prof. Chia-ju Chang
地球去殖民化：生態批評教學」講座系列
美國紐約市立大學布魯克林學院現代語言文學系
講者：Scott Slovic (史洛維克),教授,愛達荷大學環境人文傑出教授
主持人：張嘉如教授
This presentation offered a basic primer to the broad and diverse field of ecological literary and cultural studies, or “ecocriticism,” beginning with a series of definitions used by pioneers in the field. In addition to definitions, the lecture provided a brief sketch of the historical development of the field from the 1970s to the present, indicating the five waves of ecocriticism and showing how ecocriticism currently fits within the broader interdisciplinary field called “the environmental humanities,” which places ecocriticism alongside such fields as environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental religious studies, and environmental sociology, among other sub-disciplines. Throughout the talk key approaches and terms within ecocriticism-such as econarratology, precarity and ecoprecarity, empirical ecocriticism, bioregionalism, eco-cosmopolitanism, multi-ethnic ecocriticism, comparative ecocriticism, slow violence, transcorporeality, material ecocriticism, and the use of ecocritical approaches to reaching beyond academic audiences-were mentioned. Finally, the lecture demonstrated how ecocritics might read specific cultural texts, using three poems-Ofelia Zepeda’s “It Is Going to Rain,” William Stafford’s “Maybe Alone on My Bike,” and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”-as diverse examples. The takeaways from the lecture were: 1) Ecocriticism is a flexible, rapidly evolving discipline that mixes easily with other disciplines; 2) Ecocriticism emphasizes aesthetic, ethical, sociological, and psychological facets of environmental experience; 3) Ecocriticism highlights the importance of “discourse” (language); and 4) Environmental texts (literature, film, visual art, etc.) can be used in any pedagogical context to make abstract concepts more tangible and meaningful-more “experiential”-for students.
Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in the early 1990s, and from 1995 to 2020 was the editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. His most recent publications include the co-edited volumes Nature and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). He currently co-edits the book series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities.

[@catherinemcmillan6111]

Great lecture thank you 🙂

[@ChiajuChang]

Correction! The second talk by Prof. Anthony Lioi is on Nov. 14 at 10 am (EST).