The Jehovah Project

Nature school open for business.




I sometimes think that "syllabus" is short for "silly business," because these documents present students with a coherence which typically has more to do with the business of the university as it organizes and funds its knowledge categories than with any obvious unity in the subject matter. Nevertheless, existence is rife with unities of all sorts, and if we want to hold some of these connections fast in a syllabus for twelve weeks, well, that's not so bad. Here's my offering for Fall, 2006. Future semesters below. The three courses are roughly on these three topics: nature, cities, goodness. As far as I'm concerned, anyone with an enquiring mind is invited.

David Thomson
Natures’ Futures
Fall, 2006

University of Toronto CompLit
COL5060[H/F]:
Tuesdays 10-12
georgianbay2004@yahoo.com
Other materials at: The Jehovah Project: http://www.jehovahproject.blogspot.com/ and at Ground Below Zero http://www.groundbelowzero.blogspot.com/


Course description
What if nature weren’t a fact around which we might want to assemble some values, but one proposition amongst many? What if we add an “s” to nature? In this course we will consider the present moment and its need for environmental action as a history viewed from the future as the past. Any regrets? I will attempt to make the case for militant ecology in an environment in which no entity in the surround can be taken for granted, neither human nor nonhuman subjects, nor science, nor nature, nor even the French love of wine. I will float a number of claims (for example, “no one is responsible for what he or she has done and therefore no one is responsible for the environment”) and we can see what treating them as propositions in our collective might entail.

Evaluation
Research paper: 60%
Critical Responses, Oral Presentation, and Participation: 40%

­Prequel
You won’t need to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars nor Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for the course, but they will tend to have a ghostly presence.
Quotes from Red Mars:
“The planet is the lab.” 312
“What we can process won’t sublime.” 312
“What’s nice is we can pollute all we want…” 317
“The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. ‘Well’, he finally said. ‘We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.’” 440
“Well, here we are.” 452
And this from Moby-Dick:
“But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms…” 423 (Penguin!)

Quotations about hawks
“I see a circling hawk, high, skyward, needing identification.” --Aldo Leopold, 60
“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.” –Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea [Frederic Jameson says that SF fans look down on fantasy fans according to the same measure they themselves are despised by readers of traditional narratives.]

Readings, or, The Scholar’s Idle Times
For Emerson, nature was the main business of life, and books were for the scholar’s “idle times.” In addition to the readings below, there will be photocopies from time to time, and an occasional screening. The course is designed for a limited number of students in order to maintain flexibility in the choice of readings.

Week 1 (Sep 12): No taxation without representation: this course in a complit department is, after all, comparatively literary (concerned with the many forms of representation).
*Selections from Moby Dick

Week 2 (Sep 19): What if “nature” is the word for our pretending to know what the environment is, then hiding [naturalizing] that pretense?
· Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, Intro and Chpt. 1

Week 3 (Sep 26): Nature in globalization’s infinity of images. [short response paper due]
· Latour Chpt. 2
· selection from Mattelart (if the globe is Exhibit A in our case for nature, Mattelart wants to consider the way in which real-time networks, and their histories, are shaping the way the planet is organized.)

Week 4 (Oct 3): Does Canada have “nature”?
· Aldo Leopold, “The Upshot,” part IV of A Sand County Almanac, 1949
· Latour, review of Chpt. 1 (viewed through Chpt. 3)
· Selections from Lowbagger.org: this week’s articles by Elba Kramer (my veranym) and by Earth First! founder Mike Roselle.

Week 5 (Oct 10; no Thanksgiving break): The American desert as Mars.
· Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

Week 6 (Oct 17): Plato’s cave, American style.
· “Nature,” Emerson, 1836

Week 7 (Oct 24): Gift: falling into history.
· Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, chpts. 1-3
· Winona LaDuke, “Social Justice, Racism, and the Environmental Movement,” 1993 [http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barladuke.htm, has some good stuff on gift and reciprocity]
· Green Mars, 1994, pages 1-294 (especially 289-94 on gift)

Week 8 (Oct 31): Representations, the future as heuristic.
· Green Mars (cont)
· Selections from Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future

Week 9 (Nov 7): Eco-nomy and gift.
· Thoreau, “Economy” in Walden, 1854
· Student presentation on Winona LaDuke, Native American economist.

Week 10 (Nov 14) Outside (theory and practice).
*Cary Wolfe, “Nothing Fails like Success: The Postmodern Moment and the Problem of the ‘Outside’” [this is the short introduction to Theory Out of Bounds, and there is a play on the term “outside” as both outdoors and as philosophically about whether there’s a privileged outside from which to form a critique of nature.]
*----. “Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism” [http://www.altx.com/EBR/EBR4/wolfe.htm, a short book review suggesting that there might be things that are worse than Deep Ecology]
*Student presentation on Antarctica.

Week 11 (Nov 21) Forests: the storage of carbon and memory for futures.
*William Cronon, “Taking the Forest,” in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
*----. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” http://history.wisc.edu/cronon/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html
*Jeffrey St. Clair, “Forest or Against Us” in Counterpunch (1993) http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair08232003.html
*Selections from: Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, 1993
*Selections from Robert Macfarlane’s Guardian series.

Week 12 (Nov 28) Car praxis: where the rubber hits the road. 2030 versus 1958: What if the future were in the past?
Research Papers: drafts or title and first pages due.
*Derek Wall, “Earth First!” and “Car wars” in “Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement” (1999)

Week 13 (Dec 5) Review: Are we crazy?
*Selections from Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1982.
Research Papers due 15 December

Course for Fall, 2007:


The course will continue to add features which will make it more "comp lit," including texts which can be read optionally in Spanish and French, including Elisabeth Vonarburg, Elejo Carpentier, and Borges.



Unknown Nation: the literature of utopia and gift

This is a course on goodness. We might say that utopia and gift are, respectively, the goodness of place and the goodness of action.

We will begin our exploration of the juxtaposition of these two timely and urgent theoretical categories with Kim Stanley Robinson’s “unknown nation,” an immense range of diverse utopias hidden in an astonishing array of geological anomalies across the surface of Mars. Some of these communities attempt to subvert transnational capital flows with gift economies. But given time and the exigencies of life, what gift could there be which would be immune from any expectation of return? Even with the best of intentions, gift is likely to be “ungifted.” Nevertheless gift, like utopia, does its best work without ever quite existing. Our texts will include science fiction, utopian and dystopian literature, and theory. Can we establish a praxis of goodness?

We will encounter difficult theoretical and philosophical texts, but seek a practical route through the various pitfalls and specters of charity, altruism, and benevolence. Our method: close reading. Our desire, le plaisir du texte.

Readings
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions (2005),
David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1997)
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money (1992)
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property (1979)
Philip Kindred Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
____. The Dispossessed (1974)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (1996)
Carol Shields, Unless (2000)
Nick Hornby, How To Be Good, (2001)
Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic (2003)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
Scott Gardiner, The King of Canada (2007)
William Shakespeare, King Lear (1623)

Essex brickmaker John Cant next to a Roman wall.




I'll be offering the following course for grad students in Comp Lit, Winter, 2007. Students in other departments are also invited.








Contemporary Psychogeographies

Psychogeography, the literary movement now ascendant in Europe, is in one sense as old as mid-twentieth-century French Situationism. Yet it seems as if suddenly everyone has something to say about it. Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian writes approvingly of Iain Sinclair’s “anti-materialist psychogeography.” For Keith Wilson the present moment in travel writing is concerned with “the subjectively associational, the psycho-geographic rather than the topographical.” When British literary icon Marina Warner assembled a conference on psychogeography earlier this year at The University of Essex, she did not have to draw from the literary fringes. There may be some evidence that psychogeography is coming into its own even here in North America, though we might have to ask ourselves what would count. Could it be discovered in, say, environmental critic Timothy Morton’s reconceptualizations of environmental time and space—not to mention time and spice, with spice as an emblem of the blandishments of capitalism? Or should we be looking at the traditional novel in, say, Toronto?

This course is an inquiry into the literary form of the phenomenon, even if psychogeography gets much of its energy and “street cred” from a variety of disciplines, genres, and practices. We begin with the French situation in the 1960’s (students will be invited to read in French if they would like). The centerpiece of the course will be urban novels and recent psycho-geographical works from London, together with books about the 2000-year-old “manufactured landscape” of nearby Essex. We will also read novels from Toronto and consider the built landscapes here in this city.

We could define the city—Paris, London, or Toronto, say—as a place where, in a single afternoon, you might be immersed in urban semiotics, struck by a new aesthetic, and run over by a tram. Your position, in other words, matters. Cities are intense and real—a form of wilderness—and the status of this “real” will be interrogated, especially inasmuch as architectural fragments have a tendency to refer elsewhere in the global economy. Topics will include many aspects of the built environment and its negotiations in time and space, including urban nature and architecture and spectacle, and manufactured landscapes. The vocabulary of Situationism—derive, détournement, flaneur—will find a completely new context in contemporary London. Surrealism, mapping, drifting, street haunting, and contemporary art will come within our purview, but the pleasures of the literary text will be, I hope, paramount. Enjoy.

Readings
Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’ (1993); Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), Walter Benjamin, selections from The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk—1940); Angel Rama, The Lettered City (1996)

***
Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Jane Jacob’s Dark Age Ahead (2004)

***
Martin Amis, London Fields (1989); Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988); W.G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (1999), Iain Sinclair, Liquid City (1999), Edge of the Orison (2006), Peter Ackroyd, selections from London, The Biography (2000); Ian McEwen, Saturday (2005); Ken Worpole, 350 Miles, A journey through Essex (2005); Marina Warner, “Memory Maps” (2006-07)

***
Susan Buck-Morss, “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe”; Patrick Wright, “Industrial bread and a ship full of bombs: some reflections on history and heritage in East London” (2006); Susan Alice Fischer, “A Room of Our Own: Rodinsky, Street Haunting, and the Creative Mind” (2001); Timothy Morton, “’Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem” (2001); Brian Baker, “Maps of the London Underground”; Richard Sennet, selections from The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities, Faber and Faber (1991)

Other readings will be posted before the course begins. Check here: http://www.jehovahproject.blogspot.com/

Evaluation
A research paper will be 60% of the grade. The rest will be participation, and a portion of that will undoubtedly take some stock of our particular urban context and what is happening in early 2007. Stay tuned.