The Department of Germanics offers several exciting literature and culture courses in English. This spring we offer:
GERMAN 385 A: Rhetoric and Social Justice
Cultures of Extinction
MW 1:30-2:20 THO 125 / F 1:30-2:20 OUG 141
Joint Sections: Germ 385A, LIT 298 B, ENGL 379 A, ENVIR 495 A
Instructor: Professor Jason Groves / jagroves@uw.edu
This course explores the widespread fascination with the end of the world in literature, art, and film. Amidst the superabundance of contemporary post-apocalyptic and dystopian fictions we will focus on texts that address, whether directly or indirectly, one of the more wicked problems of the 21st century: The Sixth Extinction. Rather than approaching this mass extinction event solely as a biological phenomenon, this course looks at how current threats to bio-diversity are implicated in and connected to threats to cultural diversity, such as the loss of language and traditional ecological knowledge. We will seek to understand how the discourse of extinction, beginning from its “discovery” in the eighteenth century, is related to fraught histories of colonialism and imperialism, whose ecological effects extend into the present and threaten to shape the future.
Amidst all of the doom and gloom we will explore what a recent anthology calls “the arts of living on a damaged planet.” While the course seeks to grasp the scale of the Sixth Extinction, it will also critically reflect upon, and propose alternatives to, the dominant apocalyptic narratives in which extinction is framed in the popular imagination. Fiction and nonfictional texts drawn from across the humanities, arts, and social sciences will explore and critique framings of “the end” with an eye toward reclaiming a more socially and environmentally just future. Course materials are wide-ranging and will encompass works of popular science (e.g. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction), activist primers (e.g. Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: A Radical History), memorials to species loss (e.g. Maya Lin’s What is Missing), Afrofuturist film (e.g. Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi), Native American literature (e.g. Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices), and German, Swiss, and Austrian ecofeminist fictions (e.g. Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall). Coursework will be multi-disciplinary and collaborative and will involve analytical and creative assignments.
English is the language of instruction and course readings.
Please find attached our course descriptions and the flyer for Cultures of Extinction.