Roman Bartosch

Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene? And what can reading teach us? To answer these questions, the book develops a concept of transcultural ecology that understands fiction and interpretation as text models that help address the various and incommensurable scales inherent to climate change. Focussing on text composition, reception, storyworlds, and narrative framing in world literature and elsewhere, each chapter elaborates on central educational objectives through the close reading of texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole and J.M. Coetzee as well as films, picture books and new digital media and their aesthetic affordances. At the end of each chapter, these objectives are summarised in sections on the ‘general implications for studying and teaching’ (GIST) and together offer a new concept of transcultural competence in conversation with current debates in literature pedagogy and educational philosophy.

Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology

Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change

Dominik Ohrem

This volume explores the potential of the concept of the creaturely for thinking and writing beyond the idea of a clear-cut human-animal divide, presenting innovative perspectives and narratives for an age which increasingly confronts us with the profound ecological, ethical and political challenges of a multispecies world. The text explores written work such as Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, video media such as the film "Creature Comforts" and the video game Into the Dead, and photography. With chapters written by an international group of philosophers, literary and cultural studies scholars, historians and others, the volume brings together established experts and forward-thinking early career scholars to provide an interdisciplinary engagement with ways of thinking and writing the creaturely to establish a postanthropocentric sense of human-animal relationality.

Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture

Beyond the Human-Animal Divide

Julia Hoydis

The present collection takes stock of posthumanism and its theoretical development and impact in the field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on its role in education and the practice of teaching English.0Posthumanism informs work in environmental or ecological criticism, climate change research, or human-animal studies ? and poses an educational challenge since it also affects curricular and pedagogic theory and practice. Moreover, humanist idea(l)s of subject formation and individually acquired competences have a direct bearing on conceptions of education. This is why the volume interrogates the potentials and pitfalls of posthumanist pedagogies and its connections with digitization, multiliteracies, non-European and non-anthropocentric thinking, and the role of literature pedagogy more generally, presenting case studies of teaching the posthuman from primary to tertiary levels.

Teaching the Posthuman

This book introduces the notion of "educational ecology" as a necessary and promising pedagogic principle for the teaching of Anglophone literatures and cultures in a time of climate change. Drawing on scholarship in the environmental humanities and practice-oriented research in education and literature pedagogy, chapters address the challenges of climate change and the demand for sustainability and environmental pedagogy from the specific perspective of literary and cultural studies and education, arguing that these perspectives constitute a crucial element of the transdisciplinary effort of "cultivating sustainability." The notion of an "educational ecology" takes full advantage of the necessarily dialogic and co-constitutive nature of sustainability-related pedagogical philosophy and practice while it retains the subject-specific focus of research and education in the humanities, centring on and excelling in critical thinking, perspective diversity, language and discourse awareness, and the literary and cultural constructions of meaning. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of language, literature and culture pedagogy, as well as transdisciplinary researchers in the environmental humanities.

Steps to an Educational Ecology

Cultivating Sustainability in Language and Literature Pedagogy

This book addresses the role and potential of literature in the process of contesting and re-evaluating concepts of nature and animality, describing one’s individual environment as the starting point for such negotiations. It employs the notion of the ‘literary event’ to discuss the specific literary quality of verbal art conceptualised as EnvironMentality. EnvironMentality is grounded on the understanding that fiction does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions but that it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge manifesting in processes determined by the human capacity to think beyond a given hermeneutic situation. Bartosch foregrounds the dialectics of understanding the other by means of literary interpretation in ecocritical readings of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Zakes Mda, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, arguing that EnvironMentality helps us as readers of fiction to learn from the books we read that which can only be learned by means of reading: to “think like a mountain” (Aldo Leopold) and to know “what it is like to be a bat” (Thomas Nagel).

Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction.

EnvironMentality.

Sieglinde Grimm

This collection presents essays on current developments in ecocriticism and the pedagogical practice of teaching English at all levels. They cover discussions of the nexus between the sciences and the humanities and suggest ways to teaching environments in the context of historical and transdisciplinary encounters with ecology, nature, and animals.

Roman Bartosch

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