Module description
Extraction Narratives explores the radical implications resource extraction has had on the earth, and on life on earth, since the late-eighteenth century.
Team-taught by scholars with specialisms in the history of science, environmental studies and ecocriticism, Black Studies, gender and postcolonialism, and with expertise in a diverse range of global literatures, this module gives students a unique opportunity to explore the current environmental crisis from multiple theoretical and cultural perspectives.
Students will ask: what kinds of stories have been told about the earth, its resources, and those whose labours are deployed to extract it - and by whom? What have been the racialised and gendered politics of those stories, and how have they erased or elevated certain kinds of knowledge, and shaped conditions for survival for diverse groups of the earth's inhabitants? How do literary texts participate in, resist, or mobilise, modes of extraction? How has the metaphor of 'extraction' been activated as a tool for organising not only material resources, but also for conceptualising human and animal life, and the creation and circulation of literary texts and ideas? And how do aesthetic ideas about transition, exhaustion, progress, decline, frontiers, or justice shape both literary texts and the material configuration of the earth?
Drawing on expertise from across the English department at KCL, this module will also enable students to compare the creation and critique of extraction narratives by British, Indian, South African, North American, and/or Caribbean writers and thinkers.
NB: module will be taught in two-hour weekly seminars.
Assessment details
4000 Word Essay
Teaching pattern
two-hour weekly seminars