Where is language in the environment? Over the past five decades, linguists and critics have debated this question, elaborating concepts and methodologies permitting the study of language’s ecology. More than a metaphor, this verbal ecology describes how words, gestures and other forms of communication leave their trace in the material world, informing everything from how crops are grown to how we perceive our own bodies. To study verbal ecology is thus to join in a collective effort to discern language’s effects not only in books and conversation but in forests, oceans and rainstorms as well. In parallel, for those who work in the language arts, verbal ecology poses a set of political possibilities stemming from the discipline’s basic refusal to separate investigations of the material world, on the one hand, and research into symbolic representations, on the other. These possibilities were evoked by linguist Michael Halliday when he declared that, “classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution and the like [...] are not just problems for the biologists and physicists. They are problems for the applied linguistic community as well.”[1]

In this seminar, we will ask how the imaginative works of a trio of writers might offer insights into the verbal ecologies in which we all live. We will begin by close-reading Natalie Sarraute’s Tropisms (Unit 1), a book that queries the borders between people and their environment by taking for its object of study the affective states from which consciousness emerges. Sarraute’s texts present an experience of words as objects that shape mood and thought as much as light, heat or other environmental factors: we will read them as experiments in writing that explore the theoretical postulates articulated within the verbal ecological paradigm. From there, we will move onto Patrick Chamoiseau’s Caribbean epic Texaco (Unit 2), a text bringing together two key currents in ecolinguistics: on the one hand, an investigation of the discursive practices that underwrite historical forms of environmental racism; on the other, a consideration of the ecological relationships between different languages. Offering a history of Martinique as told by the island’s most marginalized peoples, Texaco will lay the groundwork for our class’s discussion of the connections between racialized capitalism, language loss and ecocide. Finally, an examination of Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (Unit 3) will permit us to ask how non-human animals participate in verbal ecologies of all kinds.

As this is an R1b course, students will be expected to draw from our readings and discussions inspiration for their own research projects. These will be completed in a step-by-step fashion via a series of three tiered assignments, each one coming at the end of a unit. More information about these tiered assignments will be given over the course of the semester. Besides the tiered research assignments, students will also be asked to complete smaller writing tasks designed to hone specific skills necessary for doing college-level research, as well as two micro creative writing projects called interunit reflections.

[1] Halliday, M. A. “New ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics.” In Pütz, Thirty

years of linguistic evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 92

This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.