November 2, 2015 - 09:42
Khadijah setting the scene; Madi on for next Tuesday
I. 11:25-11:35: coursekeeping
* 4:30 today in Thomas 110: David J. Vázquez's public talk,
“Fueling the Agribusiness Engine: Helena María Viramontes’s Under
the Feet of Jesus and the Cross-Currents of U.S. Environmentalism”
Strongly encourage you to go...
by 5 p.m. tomorrow, your tenth 3-pp. web-event is due, gathering material to compare Kolbert and Oreskes/Conway, in terms of their key ideas, their impact, and/or the different ways they tell their stories. This is in preparation for developing the claim that you’ll articulate in next week's web event (when you might use one text as a foil to set up the other, or develop a claim about only one of them...)
For Tuesday's class, read Elizabeth Kolbert's article about the work of Van Jones,
Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for both Global Warming and Poverty?
The New Yorker (January 12, 2009).
By 5 p.m. Mon: tenth short posting, either reporting on Vázquez's talk, or
responding to Van Jones' call, in the voice of a character we've met,
or author we've read this semester.
checking in re: archival work? everyone interested in this clear re: next steps?
II. 11:35-11:50
some info re: cli-fi, eco-semiotics, eco-linguistics, "green grammar":
focus on how language structure influences and shapes our thinking,
how conventional English usage, in particular, invites/forces us to imagine
that the world is made up of separate entities
ecolinguists experiment w/ changing the common structure of English grammar:
the conventional subject-verb-object ("Anne called the class to order") implies
that there are two separate entities that are fixed and static;
can we give a more basic role to the verb?
make it more reflective of unbroken, undivided movement ("conversing happens..."?)
eco-linguists also think about the shape of stories: no background, no foreground,
but unified field perception....
and they think about the words we use!
"Lexicon of Archaic Terms"
Take a minute to look through the lexicon again,
pick one keyword that stood out to you.
When you have one, find a partner and share.
What emerged ....?
How does the "lexicon of archaic terms" and our conversation about it
resemble/differ from our keyword exercise on Wild?
What's like/different about tracing an etymology (finding a history) of a word,
declaring that word "archaic," and creating a new word, language, or stories?
What makes a word archaic? When/how do you know that new words are needed?
How are words political? (ex: definition of 'environmental protection' on p. 56)
III. 11:50-12:10: talking some more about the politics
Read aloud first paragraph of Epilogue.
Reality check: Take out your article, review what you marked/wrote out as the lede.
What did you find out? What are governments doing in response to climate change?
Go around and share: Just the lede.
Take notes as others speak.
IV. 12:10-12:45: Discussion
What do we think about Oreskes and Conway’s claim that governments
“were at first unwilling and then unable” to intervene effectively?
(read opening paragraph of Epilogue again?)
Are we addressing the confusion Abby described @ the end of our last class?