German 110: Media Environments, Ecocriticism and German Palm Tree Dreams

Instructor: Kalani Michell

This course explores emerging scholarship on the relationship between media and the environment. It will focus on German and European histories and theories of perceptual, artificial, virtual and infrastructural media environments, as well as their postcolonial implications. Students will become familiar with recent debates in ecocritical discourse and consider a range of literary and theoretical texts, artworks, photographs and films, from Germany and elsewhere, that intervene in these discussions. In examining media objects that thematize the environment, this course will also reflect on how media studies, as a discipline, is potentially being shaped by this embrace of new ecocritical theory. Taught in English.