Writing the Anthropocene ENGL 30124 – TB1 2021-22

Summative Essay questions

For this essay, you should answer ONE of the below questions

You may also write your own question for this assessment, but I must approve
your chosen question before you can write on it. Please book an office hour
with me *in good time* before the assessment due date if you would like to
write your own question.

1. ‘[Rachel] Carson had almost nothing to say directly about empire, class, and
race, yet her work speaks powerfully to the environmentalism of the poor
because she was passionately concerned with the complicity of the military
industrial complex in disguising toxicity, both physically and rhetorically.’ (Rob
Nixon, Slow Violence)

Discuss either
i) the impact of Carson’s work on another writer or writers
Or
ii) the relation between nature writing and ‘the environmentalism of the poor’

2. ‘To appreciate grass, you must lie down in grass.’ (Louise Erdrich, ‘Big Grass’)

Discuss, in two or more texts, the necessity to ecological awareness of sensory

experience.

3. ‘My genetic memory of ancestors hunted down and preyed upon in rural
settings counters my fervent hopes of finding peace in the wilderness. Instead
of the solace and comfort I seek, I imagine myself in the country as my
forebears were – exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected – a target of cruelty and
hate.’ (Evelyn White, ‘Black Women and the Wilderness’)

In two or more texts, discuss the portrayal of exclusion from ‘the country’ or ‘the
wilderness’

4. ‘A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it. The spirit may
differ from the spirit we know in animals or plants or in ourselves. In the end
we all originate from the depths of the earth. Perhaps this is how all beings
share in the spirit of the Creator. We do not know.’ (Leslie Marmon Silko,
‘Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination’)
 Using two or more texts, discuss the ecological perspective of Native American
writing.

5. “Scientific disputes continue to be conducted in literature, mostly in journals of

science and sometimes in the wider media. These disputes are never ‘purely’
scientific; they are always language-based processes” (Charlotte Sleigh)

Explore how writers have navigated the relationship between literature and science in
writing about Nature, with reference to two or more texts.

6. ‘The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the
eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been startled
out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Neither of us could bear to
look away. Its face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face
of a drowned man. I moved. I could not help it. And the owl suddenly turned it
head, shuffled along the branch as though cringing, and flew softly away into
the wood. (J. A. Baker, The Peregrine)

Consider the portrayal of encounters with non-human animals in two or more texts.

7. ‘Anthropocentrism is a pitfall of the Anthropocene, when the emphasis is on

the first part of the neologism, the Anthropos. In particular, the danger is that
real lives are subsumed by humanity thought in the abstract, a flattened
worldview that disregards the fact that the “we” of the Anthropocene is
profoundly conflicted, composed of extremely mismatched orders of culpability
and exposure. The experience of the Anthropocene is defined by privilege,
marked by structural inequalities and huge disparities, in both consumption
patterns and the capacity to ride out the consequences of a changing climate.’
(David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics)

Consider how one or more writers respond to or address the pitfalls of the term
“Anthropocene”.

8. ‘To the degree to which nature writing and nature poems, for instance, appeal
to or invoke reader associations with the pastoral and the idyll, they take the
reader out of time, either nostalgically or mythically. […] The appeal to the idyll
is highly contradictory and needs to be understood as such. On the one hand, it
fruitfully reasserts an organic and holistic relationship of humanity and the
more-than-human that needs to be revitalized in the increasingly de-natured
 life of urban consumerism. On the other hand, the carrying away of the reader
from the present may lessen the sense of crisis and decrease feelings of need for
engagement with the environmental issues of the day (Patrick Murphy,
‘Dialoguing with Bakhtin’)

Does the nature writing you have been reading share and / or respond to the
contradictory qualities of pastoral?

9. ‘As late as the 1950s, the myth of human redemption through technology was
still alive and active in the minds of Americans, western and eastern alike. […]
Today [1993] the attitudes of Americans have begun to change perceptibly [….]
It is no longer clear that the domination of nature […] carries any promise of
mankind’s moral redemption.’ (Donald Worster, ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and
the Water’)

Either i) consider the role of technology in two or more texts

Or ii) consider how writers reflect – or perhaps dispute – Worsters’s perception of a

change of attitudes towards technology

10. ‘Amid the expanding lexicon of environmental catastrophe, it is no surprise

that there are new words for fear. After all, to pay attention to what is
happening to the world, and to imagine what might come next, is to be afraid.
[…] ‘Eco-anxiety’, some call it – a term that has, at least, the benefit of lucidity.
‘Solastalgia’, others say – which does not. These words fix a label to the chronic
alarm that, increasingly, many feel. Like a lepidopterist’s pin, they fasten that
feeling to the page. Now, they seem to say, we know what we are dealing with.
Now we understand. (Malachy Tallack, ‘What we Talk about when we Talk
about Solastalgia’)

Write either
i) about writerly responses to the fear produced by ‘what is happening in the
world’

Or ii) about the processes of denial depicted by and present within literary work
about the environmental crisis

11. ‘[Forrest] Gander describes poetry as something that can “tear” us “awake” (A
Faithful Existence 45) arousing a state of embodied attentiveness to non-human
presence, but also as something that cultivates a tolerance for “silence, an
 almost religious gesture of openness”’ (Louise Economides, The Ecology of
Wonder)

Using any of the elements of this quotation, discuss the qualities and effect of one or
more of the poets you have been reading on this unit.