Green Hour am 11. Juli 2024, 12-13 Uhr:

"Hemingway, Ecology, and Culture: Re-reading Ernest Hemingway in the Anthropocene" (Dr. Lay Sion Ng)

In this talk, Dr. Lay Sion Ng will introduce Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene, the first monograph to give ‘voice’ to the underrepresented nonhuman matter in Hemingway’s literature in the light of environmental humanities, more specifically, material ecocriticism. Bringing together Hemingway studies and material ecocriticism, she seeks to expand Hemingway’s notion of ‘humanity’ by foregrounding the narratives of nonhuman entities through the lenses of elemental ecocriticism, disability studies, color ecology, soil ethics, environmental history, eco-gothic, posthumanism, cultural ecology, and so on.

The book unfolds through close readings of Hemingway’s long novels (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, The Garden of Eden, Islands in the Stream), short stories (“The Snows of Kilimanjaro, “A Natural History of the Dead) and non-fiction (Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa), before proposing to consider his imaginative writing as a form of ‘cultural ecology’, a term developed by Hubert Zapf. She challenges the anthropocentric, hyper-masculine ‘papa’ preconceptions of recent American literary scholarship, reshaping the dominant notions of Hemingway’s fame, characters, and literary legacy.

A non-anthropocentric reading of Hemingway’s works can further encourage reflection on one’s ecological ambivalence, considering how one’s ego/eco mindset is shaped and influenced by the cultural, political, social, and environmental factors surrounding one. Ultimately, the book aims to inspire readers to rethink what it means to be ‘human’ in a world encompassing more than just humans and promote ecological awareness and responsibility among readers.

Dr. Lay Sion Ng is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Education of Global Communication at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her academic interests include Hemingway studies, material ecocriticism, trans- and posthumanism, teaching English through literature, peer tutoring, etc. Her recent publications include “Teaching ‘Indian Camp’ in the Japanese Classroom” (2023) in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice, “Towards a Politics of Cure: Jake Barnes’s Mastery of Submission in The Sun Also Rises” (2022) in The Hemingway Review. She has a forthcoming book, Hemingway, Ecology and Culture: Re-reading Hemingway in the Anthropocene, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic.

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Green Hour am 18. Juli 2024, 12-13 Uhr:

"Learning through Nature: A History of Environmental Education in America" (Prof. Charles Dorn)

Climate Change. Species Extinction. Deforestation. Toxic Waste. For more than a century, Americans have quarreled over the causes and consequences of environmental decline. The ferocity of these debates—and the way they exposed profoundly conflicting understandings of the natural world—compels the question of how Americans came to learn about the environment over time.

My current research reveals that between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, educators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and others systematically indoctrinated young people into settler-colonial political, economic, and cultural values under the guise of learning about the natural world. Why have Americans long been in conflict over the environment? They were taught mostly through nature rather than for it. In this talk, I will discuss the origins of my book project as well as the challenges associated with writing an educational history that examines learning both inside and out of formal institutions.

Charles Dorn is an educational historian and the Barry N. Wish Professor of Social Studies at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA). His work has appeared in History of Education Quarterly, Southern African Review of Education, and Diplomatic History, and has been featured in Time and Fortune Magazines and on National Public Radio’s Throughline. Dorn is the recipient of two U.S. State Department Fulbright Awards and a Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich, Germany). He is the author of For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2017) and, with co-author Randall Curren, Patriotic Education in a Global Age (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His current project explores the history of environmental education in the United States between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Beide Vorträge finden statt im WZU (Gebäude U), Raum 101, Universitätsstr. 1a (innocube).

Das gesamte Programm mit allen Terminen finden Sie hier:

https://rethinking-environment-idk.de/wp-content/uploads/IDK-Green-Hour-SoSe-24.pdf

Und hier erhalten Sie weitere Informationen zum Gesamtevent:

https://rethinking-environment-idk.de/event/the-green-hour-3/