WiSe 2022/23

This class offers an immersive, practical, and theoretical engagement with ecopoetics: an array of creative and critical practices concerned with human-nature entanglements, environmental destruction, and ecopolitical challenges. Focusing on poetry, we will investigate approaches to contemporary writing in ecopoetics and examine how poets register and respond to ongoing transformations of the planet. These considerations will be linked to the notion of the Capitalocene, a counter-concept to the Anthropocene that acknowledges some of the controversies surrounding a designated ‘human epoch’. Correspondingly, the creative writing we will develop in this class will be guided by questions concerning human/more-than-human encounters, energy and extraction, interactions between language and the physical-material world, innovative ecopoetical form, and socio-ecological justice. As we approach these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, we will explore the capacity of ecopoetics to enmesh webs of life with world-systemic processes of accumulation and reflect on the impact of imaginative, critical, and activist practices in our present moment.

Attending to the popularity of ‘re-enchanted’ place in contemporary literary culture, this workshop-based class is designed to explore the relation between writing and place through critical reading and creative writing practice. Students are encouraged to experiment with different modes and forms of writing about, in, and with place. Through encounters with prose and poetry from writers whose work is explicitly informed by the contemplation of place, we will reflect on the meaning of place as a ‘lived experience’ embedded in cultural, material, historical, social, and political contexts. Themes explored may include on-site writing, place and movement, landscape and nature writing, notions of home, travel writing, displacement and migration, and place and identity. Our practice-based considerations will be accompanied by critical investigations into different concepts and cultural imaginaries of place with attention to the imbrications, interdependencies, and interrelations between place, human, and the environment in a globalised world.

Language is known for incorporating both iconicity (resemblance of form and meaning, e.g. “woof woof”) and arbitrariness (arbitrary association of form and meaning, e.g. “dog”) in its lexicon (Dingemanse et al., 2015), which obeys grammar, a system of even higher abstraction. In this course we will look at the interaction of these three basic features of human language and communication, in order to gain insight into how humans create abstract systems out of and with iconicity. We will focus on diverse languages and on multimodal communication, which also includes visual information. Firstly, the students will learn how to recognize different degrees of iconicity and arbitrariness in language, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Secondly, we will focus on the universal tendency of language and multimodal signs to increase their level of arbitrariness and grammatical systematicity over time. And lastly, we will use what we have learned to draw conclusions about general principles of linguistic and cultural evolution.

This is the Moodle for the Aufbauseminar "Rational Normativity" taught in Winter Semester 2022/23 by Prof. Brendan Balcerak Jackson.