Monday, October 30, 2017

cloud formations


Monday class time - and today we were talking about ecocriticism and the Anthropocene.  And weather, and atmosphere - and hence, clouds.  And so Sarah and Zach, introducing, made word clouds - so that we could visualize the word frequency and patterns in our readings from - in descending order - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction” and “Geophilia: The Love of Stone” from Stone.  An Ecology of the Inhuman (ooooooh, look: that proves that he uses "stone" a lot ...);


Jesse Oak Taylor, “Introduction: A Novel Climate” and Chapter 8, “Climactic Modernism: Virginia Woolf and Anthropocene Literary History,” from The Sky of Our Manufacture.  The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf


and Stacy Alaimo, “Introduction: Dwelling in the Dissolve” and Chapter 1, “This is about Pleasure: An Ethics of Inhabiting,” from Exposed.  Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.

We were also given stones to write about: I rather grumpily painted half of mine blue, because (a) I had some blue paint in my pencil case and (b) I thought that might make it interesting.  It didn't.  

I was deeply grateful to the students who presented today - they did a fabulous job, posing a huge number of big and detailed questions to think about - indeed, they saved my coughing and laryngitic self.  And if you think that we must have our own climate issues here in LA - yes, Sarah is wearing a large fur hat - not as a prop, but because the A/C is still cranked up very, very high.

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