ACLA 2024 Seminar: Literary Criticism as Environmental Thinking?
Is the 20 c. inheritance of literary criticism in its various modes of strong, ‘suspicious’, deep reading woefully inadequate for reckoning with the current and impending environmental crises, as many have claimed?
Critics declare that these crises demand entirely new concepts and ways of doing things, for example borrowing from the sciences and social sciences. But the practice of criticism, as opposed to its programmatic statements, remains remarkably consistent. This observation leads us to ask what kinds of environmental thinking established practices of criticism already perform. In other words, which concepts and methods that are not explicitly environmental are good for thinking environmentally?