Hi everyone,

I just found the extinction studies listserv, and wondered whether anyone might be interested in browsing a course outline for a course I'm teaching this term on Extinction Literature at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  It is a half course that I'm offering under English 383 Topic in Literature and the Environment.  It has no English or any other university-level prerequisite so 383 attracts students from across the disciplines, which is one of its additional merits as a course both from my own perspective but also the students themselves have commented on that fact.  It also tends to attract students beyond the first year of undergraduate studies, the English students for the topics and the others for their half-course credit in English that they need in order to graduate.  In some ways, the class and reading schedule is more illuminating than the simple outline, but I thought you might be interested in what texts we are studying here in Alberta.  Strictly speaking the poetry book, OCEAN, by Sue Goyette isn't really about extinction but it is about humans' (a sort of hybrid bunch of humans who are themselves both prehistoric and contemporary) relationship with ocean.  I included texts that are about mammals (bears), insects (monarch butterflies), fish (salmon and salmon restoration), birds (Thom Van Dooren's book), and an overview of animals in the anthropocene, J.B. MacKinnon's THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD: NATURE AS IT IS, AS IT WAS, AS IT COULD BE.  

I am experimenting in this first iteration of the course with having students select at random a particular animal as the center of a multi-stage "extinction project."  I chose first the animals at the center of each of the required texts on the course, and then added mostly endangered and threatened Alberta animals.  Two students have individually offered to create a website for the final projects, and one went ahead and did a mockup of such a site even before she mentioned it to me!  And it was good too.  It's not everyday one sees that amount of initiative in a class of just 21 students.

First they had to draft a proposal and an annotated bibliography around their particular species, and the next assignment is to write two to three pages as if from the point of view of an individual of that species.  The purpose of that assignment is twofold.  First, in BLACK GRIZZLY, Sid Marty writes several sections as if from the points of view of the particular bears involved in his forensic reconstruction of the events in Banff the summer of 1980 following the ecological disturbances caused by the eruption of Mt. St. Helen's.  By being asked to write as if from the point of view of the species they are researching, students will come to appreciate Marty's literary achievement in that respect and be better able to perceive literary technique.  Secondly, in order to write their own short piece, they will by next week have had to come to a sufficient understanding of their species in order to construct a day or few days in the life of it.  In other words, it furthers their project along.

I was and still am a little uneasy about the "extinction project" as a major assignment because technically it does not require the students to do any literary criticism of the central texts on paper, and because it is worth so much -- as only appropriate if they have to spend most of the course working steadily on it -- it crowds out such work.  However, it will teach research skills, how to write a proposal, annotated bibliographies, creative writing (the POV mini-essay), structuring a fairly loosely defined project, writing for the web (if that pans out), selecting images and sounds, etc.  Moreover, we are doing textual analysis for the next few weeks as we discuss the novel and the poetry book, and we are "doing theory" as we discuss the MacKinnon and Van Dooren texts.  

Anyway, this is getting lengthy, and I really just offered this outline as a way of chiming in and making a small contribution to the field in terms of my current teaching. I am also teaching a directed readings course on Animals in the Anthropocene, and I taught a course last term on Animality.  I have research under way on animals in the Alberta context, and I expect that wherever you are situated in the world you have some idea of what is going on in this province and the challenges more-than-human animals are facing in the northern part of the region.

Pamela Banting