COML 3264 - Poetics, Economies, Ecologies

(GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Spring. 3 credits. Student option grading.

J. Monroe.

How have income inequality and climate change, two of the most urgent issues of our time, come to shape the contemporary imagination? What might a poetics of economies or ecologies, or an economical or ecological poetics, look like? What metaphors and semantic fields, networks, and webs of discursive and rhetorical choices, inform discourses of economy and ecology? How might economical and ecological tropes help us rethink poetics, and vice-versa? What are their protocols and conventions, constraints and regulations, possibilities and limitations? What tensions, and what “imaginary solutions to real problems,” do we find among them? Ranging across a variety of national and international contexts, this course will explore how such concerns figure in contemporary non-fiction, poetry, fiction, film, and electronic and digital media.