Jana M Giles
Jana M. Giles is Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Her current monograph project, The Post/Colonial Sublime: Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics in the Twentieth Century, examines Western aesthetics during the decline of the British Empire in the modernist and postmodernist novel. She is the Managing Editor of Conradiana.
Phone: 3185376815
Address: j.m.giles.03[at]cantab.net
Phone: 3185376815
Address: j.m.giles.03[at]cantab.net
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This paper recounts the experience of teaching an English MA graduate course in environmental humanities for the first time at a public regional university in northeastern Louisiana. The region is one of the poorest in the United States, there is little environmental activism in the local community, and the students had little formal education in environmental issues or in literary theory in general prior to the course. At the same time, Louisiana is experiencing severe coastal erosion which constitutes a national disaster. Texts used for the course included The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011), by Timothy Clark; British Romantic poetry; Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau; The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975) by Edward Abbey; Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko; Disgrace (2000) by J.M. Coetzee; The Hungry Tide (2006) by Amitav Ghosh; and Bayou Farewell (2004) by Mike Tidwell. While the students appreciated the literary texts and theory, their response to the possibility of activism regarding our current environmental crises was muted and pessimistic. However, after the completion of the course, several students went on to implement change both locally and internationally, or reported that their attitude towards nature had been substantially modified. The paper concludes by considering the challenges to graduate education in literary studies regarding the problem of environmental activism, and recommends that prospective educators consider designing curricula which incite agency and engagement to mitigate the sense of helplessness that can arise from such course material.
This paper recounts the experience of teaching an English MA graduate course in environmental humanities for the first time at a public regional university in northeastern Louisiana. The region is one of the poorest in the United States, there is little environmental activism in the local community, and the students had little formal education in environmental issues or in literary theory in general prior to the course. At the same time, Louisiana is experiencing severe coastal erosion which constitutes a national disaster. Texts used for the course included The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011), by Timothy Clark; British Romantic poetry; Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau; The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975) by Edward Abbey; Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko; Disgrace (2000) by J.M. Coetzee; The Hungry Tide (2006) by Amitav Ghosh; and Bayou Farewell (2004) by Mike Tidwell. While the students appreciated the literary texts and theory, their response to the possibility of activism regarding our current environmental crises was muted and pessimistic. However, after the completion of the course, several students went on to implement change both locally and internationally, or reported that their attitude towards nature had been substantially modified. The paper concludes by considering the challenges to graduate education in literary studies regarding the problem of environmental activism, and recommends that prospective educators consider designing curricula which incite agency and engagement to mitigate the sense of helplessness that can arise from such course material.
“Language and Literature in the World: Conrad’s Footsteps and Reading Coetzee’s Women.” Papers on Language and Literature 53.2 (2017): 200-06.
The last decade has brought a reconsideration of the divisions between modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literary studies. At the heart of this divide has been the concept of aesthetic autonomy. An idea inherited from Kant, and the mists of Platonic time, it underpinned the aestheticism that European modernists touted while simultaneously exploiting the creative vitality of so-called primitive cultures. Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, took its direction from Said’s Orientalism and Marxist critique. Bourdieu also came along to argue that Kantian disinterestedness was no more than an ideological formation of the bourgeoisie. The assumption was that colonial or postcolonial writers were uniformly politically engaged in their literary works and rejected aesthetic autonomy as another strategy of Western domination.
Kalliney sets out to complicate the latter idea, joining the growing list of scholars deconstructing such simple binaries. Arguing that Black Atlantic writers of the 1930s-70s defended the idea of aesthetic autonomy as a means for overcoming racial barriers, he focuses on midcentury inter-cultural contact. Thwarted by political inequality, these writers argued that if British artists claimed that cultural institutions and artworks could transcend material limitations, then, so too, could they. By turning a “very capacious and flexible notion of aesthetic autonomy” (29) in their favor, black writers sought to call the bluff of the argument’s universalist claims.