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Vorheriges Semester

Narrative Claims: Fracking, Mining, Land Grabbing

Veranstaltungstyp: Seminar

Ort: 41/101

Zeiten: Di. 14:00 - 16:00 (wöchentlich)

Beschreibung: Formalities:
This master course is addressed to advanced students who are planning to conclude their written work for their master's module (both L3 / F2,3,5 and LKE). Priority placement will be given to this group of students, students who want to obtain credits for audit (Studienleistungen) will be placed if there is available space left.
Please note that final decision will be made at the start of the course, individual inquiries about placements will not be answered before that time.

Content:
Fracking, i.e. hydraulic fracturing is a highly controversial method of natural gas mining - but also a hugely profitable one. For decades, natural gas drilling (both land and off-shore) has been a major issue in debates about clean energy resources and climate change - and it has also become a major issue in documentary journalism, and fiction, popular culture, literature and film.
The course will look at and discuss three major texts of fracking literature that share a regional focus in the so-called Marcellus shale in the North-Eastern United States - which is no incident, since the particular economic, as well as aesthetic formation of this part of the U.S. from colonial times through the nineteenth century, has an intense symbolic value. The massive physical intervention into the landscape connected to fracking, as well as the particular forms of ownership and subsidence, brings these original values into conflict and collision. Our central question is about the connection between the economic, aesthetic and ideological formation of nature as landscape, more specifically, landscape as a central resource.

Major texts (please consider purchasing!):
Seamus McGraw. The End of Country. Dispatches from the Frack Zone. (2011)
Lamar Herrin. Fractures. A Novel. (2013)
Jennifer Haigh. Heat and Light. A Novel. (2016)
Bruno Latour. Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climate Regime. (2018)

Students interested in attending should have read the McGraw text in advance before the class starts.
A more specific schedule will be posted weeks before classes start, please check for updates.
All information will be made available to students on the waiting list as long as final placement has not yet been decided.