Ethos

Last additions to our syllabus are up. Hard to believe, but our final week together, at least as a community, officially speaking, is, like, you know, nigh.

Keywords Final

There are well over a hundred keywords listed below from among the many more terms we have taken up and deployed over the course of our readings and conversations this term.

For your Final you are to create three categories (conceptual, practical, figurative, whatever) entirely of your own choosing and design, and then subsume under each of these categories a number of keywords from the list below which seem to you to be related to one another in a significant or useful way through each of your chosen categories and in respect to your sense of the overall subject of our course together. "Green" is not a Keyword in the list -- but your own idiosyncratic inhabitation of Greenness, your own sense of what Greenness most importantly consists will likely emerge in the Final taken as a whole.

For each keyword you choose, provide a clear and concise definition of the term (nothing more than a sentence, at most two) in your own words, and then follow that definition with a quotation from one of the assigned texts from our syllabus. The quotation should be one that is especially illuminating for the definition you have made in some way: the quotation can be a definition that yours is a variation of, the quotation can be an example or illustration that supports your definition, the quotation can provide an analogy or figure or frame that inspired your definition, the quotation can even be something that seemed so wrongheaded to you that it provoked your definition as a kind of protest or intervention.

Your final must provide definitions and quotations for at least thirty-six keywords but no more than forty. None of your categories can contain fewer than seven keywords and none can contain more than sixteen keywords.

Each of your categories should have a title and a general explanatory paragraph (and I do mean a paragraph, not an essay) indicating what you take the category to delineate.

You can hand the final in to me personally at any time from now to the end of term, but I ask that you send it to me as a Word-readable attachment in an e-mail if you cannot place a hard copy directly into my hands. The last possible deadline for submitting the final is via e-mail, noon, Tuesday, December 15, 2009. Think about when your other finals are scheduled and when your other papers are due and fit this final Keyword Project into your schedule in a way that best suits your own situation. If you have time to get this done early rather than last minute, by all means do so. You should give yourself a good few days to do this work, since scouting through passages and notes across the whole term often yields unexpected syntheses that lead to revisions of your initial categorizations and keyword groupings. I hope this exercise is an enlightening and enjoyable one for you all rather than a drudgery. Be experimental, exploratory, earnest about it and you are almost sure to get incomparably more benefit from it.

If you have questions, always feel free to post them in Comments, e-mail them to me, raise them in class, or talk with me about them in office hours.

Here are the Keywords I'm having you choose from:

Access-to-Knowledge (a2k)
Agriculture
Agroforestry
Alienation
Anthropocene
Appropriate Technology
Atmosphere
Biodegradable
Biodiversity
Biomimicry
Biopiracy
Biosphere
Biosphere II
Cap and Trade
Climate Change
Climate Refugees
Climax Ecosystem
Co-evolution
Commons
Common Sense
Commonwealth
Consensus Science
Consent
Conservation
Consumer
Cradle-to-Cradle
Creative Commons
Custom
Deep Ecology
Democracy
Denial
Depletion
Design
Development
Downcycling
Ecology
Ecofeminism
Ecosocialism
Ecosystem
Ecosystemic Services
Eco-Village
Edible Landscaping
Enclosure
Endangered Species
Energy Descent
Environmental Justice Movement
Environmental Racism
Exoticism
Externality
Farmers Market
Feral
Finitude
Footprint
Futurism
Gaia
Genome
Geoengineering
Globalization
Greenwashing
Hierarchy
Immateralism
Indigeneity
Industrial Agriculture
Industrialism
Input Intensive
Instrumental Rationality
Integrated Pest Management
Intentional Community
Intellectual Property
Investment
Irrigation
Leapfrogging
Limit
Local
Localvore
Luddism
Militarism
Monoculture
Native
Nature
Natural Capital
Need
Niche
One Size Fits All
Organic
Pandemic
Parks
Patriarchy
Peak Oil
Peer-to-Peer (p2p)
Permaculture
Planetary
Poison
Political Ecology
Pollution
Polyculture
Post-Scarcity
Precautionary Principle
Predator
Primitivism
Public Good
Recycling
Renewable
Resilience
Resource Descent
Salination
Scientificity
Seed Saving
Seed Sharing
Slow Food
Slum
Small Is Beautiful
Smart Grid
Social Ecology
Sublimity
Sustainability
Symbiosis
Technical Metabolism
Technofix,
Toxicity
Triple Bottom Line
Urban Agriculture
Vegetarianism
Viridian
Wilderness

Links Are Up

It's Toxic World Week, not exactly cheery reading, I'm afraid -- sorry if it spoils anybody's giving of thanks festival preparations.

My Spring Courses in Rhetoric

Some of you have expressed interest, so here are the full descriptions:

Rhetoric 105 -- Homo Economicus: Setting the Stage of Enterprising Modernities

We will treat the mannered comedies book-ending the early modern Augustan period and the late modern twentieth century as both documents of and negotiations of the ramifying terrains of enterprising North Atlantic modernities. In these insistently witty plays we will discern not only the shifting urban and institutional landscape of globalizations, mass mediations, technoscientific disruptions, market disciplines, social administrations, raced and gendered relations alive across these London scenes, but also the no less shifting agencies available from the mutable, calculating, contractarian, indebted, disreputable, stylish, desiring and desired rationalities making their play there. A simplifying assumption of our course will be that in the historical figures cut by the Earl of Rochester, Oscar Wilde, and David Bowie, respectively, we discover if not exemplary then at least indicatively provocative figures that capture an emerging enterprising lifeway while at once bringing that lifeway into a highly edifying crisis from which it never will recover even when it comes to prevail. It is no accident that these figures obsessively recur in the mannered comedies we will survey together.

George Etherege: The Man of Mode
William Wycherley: The Country Wife
Laurence Dunmore: The Libertine (film)
William Congreve: The Way of the World
Richard Sheridan: The School for Scandal
John Gay: The Beggar's Opera / Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Noel Coward: Design for Living
Noel Coward: Hands Across the Sea
Joe Orton: Entertaining Mr. Sloane
Joe Orton: The Good and Faithful Servant
Todd Haynes: Velvet Goldmine (film)
Jennifer Saunders: Absolutely Fabulous (Television Series): Episodes: "Iso Tank," "Death," "Doorhandle"

Together with these mannered comedies we will be reading selections from Hobbes On Wit and Laughter, Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Willians', The Country and the City, Holland's The First Modern Comedies, Canfield's Tricksters and Estates, Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests, Brockway's The End of Economic Man, Bristol's Effeminate England, Sinfield's The Wilde Century, Harvey's The Limits to Capital, Goux's Symbolic Economies, Adorno's The Culture Industry, Lahr's Coward and his Prick Up Your Ears, Buckley's Strange Fascination: David Bowie the Definitive Story, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and who knows what else... All of the plays and readings will be available either online or in a reader available for purchase at the beginning of term.

Rhetoric 171 -- Altars and Alters to the Market: Rhetoric in the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Epoch

We will track some of the key popular and polemical exchanges that have for a time, or even still, captured the imaginations, mobilized the movements, and organized the subcultures through which an ongoing clash has played out in the reception of the New Deal and its aftermaths reverberating right up into the present day. This is a discursive clash of Altars offered up to and Alternatives offered up against what have variously been construed as exemplary "market orders." Our texts form key moments in contrary canons, whatever their relative merits, and we will be reading them as time capsules, as symptoms, as crystallizations more often than as particularly sound arguments (which too few of them manage to be). And we will be striving whatever our initial sympathies may be to inhabit all these texts in a way that connects us to whatever it is that has been so compelling in each of them to so many, whatever the outcomes to which their assumptions and aspirations likely contributed in the way of mischief or emancipation. We will be reading:

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, The End of Laissez Faire, Open Letter to FDR, Proposal for an International Clearing Union (all online)
Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos (online)
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (online)
The Grapes of Wrath (film), The Fountainhead (film)
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (online)
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Leonard Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose
Peter Shwartz, The Long Boom
John Perkins, Confession of an Economic Hit Man
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

Along with these texts we will also be reading contemporary speeches drawn -- well, mostly -- from Presidential campaigns and definitive public addresses by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama.

While not required, good background reading for the course might include looking over Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands, Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, Norman Soloman's Made Love Got War, and David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

dale's face, priceless :)

bringing to you live...green rhetoric!

Green Eats Links Are Up

Lots of stuff for next week -- but notice that most of these pieces are rather short before you panic or despair. Enjoy. Remember, I'd like three reports both Tuesday and Thursday. If you haven't gone yet, jump on it!