Eco Lit

A man’s struggle to face social injustice and then social isolation in the midst of a global pandemic…while it sounds like a human interest piece in current events, this is a story about the future (set at the turn of the 22nd century) written by a 19th-century novelist. In the first episode of our second season—and our first virtual recording session—we read this sibylline science fiction through the 21st-century lenses of human environment and our need to connect with it.

Texts discussed in this episode: Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Stacy Alaimo) and The Last Man (Mary Shelley)

0:33 - Introduction

2:42 - The Natural Resource

16:38 - The Literary Min(e)d

45:16 - Finding Footholds

59:23 - Conclusion

This episode, we retrace our steps and return to some of our favorite moments in Season One of the EcoLit Project: our growing awareness of women written about with Botanic language; the dualisms of nature and culture dividing the field; and the alternative path through it that the outside characters show us. Join us this fall as we begin a new season, from elementary reading to the elements of Ecocriticism.

From Golden-Age Arcadia to a future filled with Androids, we have always dreamed of building a better version of Nature: our world and ourselves. But the dark ecology of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reveals that not all upgrades are so different or so improved as we'd like to imagine. In this episode, we enter into his and Timothy Morton’s world, an Ecology Without Nature, where we must learn to love and live with other "unnatural" living things: the dust, the fly, the preying mantis, and the electric things.