ENGL 440 / ENGL 559
Whaleworlds
This course will explore key themes in the environmental humanities, such as energy, extinction, rights for nature, ecosemiotics, and the Anthropocene, by way of the world-building practices of whales and the human world-making projects into which they have been (often forcibly and violently) incorporated. In so doing, we will think about how the interpretive practices of the huminites can be opened to the Earth system, while recognizing that many of the features long understood to define the human, including communication, culture, and history appear in the lifeworlds of our fellow earthlings.
Provisional Reading list:
Please note: this list is provisional and subject to change!
Required readings – to be purchased in hard copy and read in full:
Rebecca Griggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Linda Hogan, The People of the Whale
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Supplemental readings:
Selections from the following will be posted on Canvas. Supplemental readings will be required for students enrolled at the 500 level, and recommended for students at the 400 level.
Philip Hoare, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Edwarda Mercado III, Why Whales Sing
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Jamie L. Jones, Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling
Richard J. King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick
- Graham Burnett,Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
Charlotte Coté, Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions
Joshua Reid, The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makah
Robert Macfarlane, Is A River Alive?
Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture and the American Century
Whale Song Article from the Conversation
Margaret Grebowitz, Whale Song (object lessons)