| Lerninhalte |
New Nature Writing is a label that sells. The term entered critical discourse in 2008 when Jason Cowley edited a special edition of Granta magazine entitled New Nature Writing; Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside and best-selling authors Helen Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane have since helped to popularize it. Sales numbers exploded in recent years. NNW describes prose texts belonging to a hybrid genre of creative non-fiction that mixes autobiography, landscape writing, scientific investigation, philosophical reflection, history, journalism etc. Diverse as it may appear, the common denominator of New Nature Writing is the investigation of the relationship of humans to their non-human environments – "nature"? – against the backdrop of an anthropocenic feeling of "constant culpability" (Jamie) in the face of climate crisis and large-scale environmental catastrophe. In the seminar, we will engage with examples of New Nature Writing together with fictional prose from a critical perspective at the crossroads of textual analysis (style, genre), cultural studies, theory (new materialism, post-humanism, post-nature, natureculture) and environmentalism. Thus we will test the genre's potential to represent the relationship between the human and the non-human in the 21st century. Please buy and read Robert Macfarlane (2019), Underland. A reader with further texts will be made available at the beginning of the term. |
