ENGL 490-004
Literature Majors Seminar
Vin Nardizzi
Term 1
Th, 2:00 PM-4:00 PM
“Plant Blindness”
According to science educators and some environmental writers, plant blindness is a condition unique to Homo sapiens. In a nutshell, the concept describes humanity’s alienation from the botanical world in modernity; it is an inability to see – and so to care for – the plants that surround and provide for them.
We’ll spend our time examining this universalizing statement about humanity’s constitutive incapacity. In this ecocritical seminar, we’ll first review the scientific literature as well as its uptake in more popular forms of environmental writing. Second, we’ll read samples from foundational critical texts in disability theory (Mel Y. Chen and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder) and indigenous environmentalism (Robin Wall Kimmerer) that will help us to identify the underlying assumptions and limitations of this vision of humanity’s blindness. Finally, we’ll turn to representations of plants themselves, as they appear in cinema, in sound recordings, and in a bouquet of literary experiments, to investigate how these texts and technologies may have contributed to (or departed from) modernity’s alleged inattention to plants. We’ll watch the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, which features a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder, and we’ll read Roald Dahl’s “The Sound Machine,” John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” and Richard Powers, The Overstory.
Students will write short responses to each week’s reading, deliver a seminar presentation, and submit a final writing assignment.
As the Faculty of Arts has determined that all BA courses will be offered online in Fall 2020, this course will go ahead using a combination of asynchronous (recorded/text/online) materials and synchronous (real-time) classes in our designated timeslot.
