LFU:online

This course aims at familiarizing students with research objectives of ecocinema and the environmental humanities, especially as they relate to questions of activism, sabotage, and terror. 

Sometimes attributed to the libertarian politician Ron Arnold, the term eco-terrorism gained currency in the early 1980s as a conservative lobbyist response to a growing number of animal and earth activist groups that had formed since the 1970s. In the wake of 9/11, the meaning of ecoterrorism acquired severe legal ramifications as it began to be considered a form of domestic terrorism. Viewed against the political history of the term, this seminar examines the changing faces eco-terrorism has assumed in US cinema from early depictions as an anarchistic green scare in the 1960s and 70s and conspiracist or paranoid representations in the 1980s and 90s to ambivalent as well as affirmative accounts of violent and disruptive interventions in the first decades of the 21^st century. Films discussed in the seminar range from Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985) to Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022). 

Presentations, discussions, reading and writing assignments

Active participation, presentation, short written responses, final research paper

A list of filmic and literary works to be read will be distributed in the first session of class.

none

The seminar "SE American Film, Media and Culture I" can be attended as the "SE American Literature and Culture II". If you wish to obtain credits for both seminars, the seminars' contents must differ substantially.