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Titel
9
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Man and Nature (EKSAMEN)
In this unit students explore the relationship between the human beings and nature in the English speaking world. With a point of departure in a blog post that interprets the Christian idea of human beings having dominion over nature, we proceed to analyze various ways in which people engage with the natural world. We work with how different texts frame eating meat, and we explore how the digital game Minecraft reveals that core American settler values, such as self-reliance and having custody of nature, remain extremely popular. We then dive into how the British romantics and the American transcendentalists viewed the connection between human beings and nature, which lets us analyze both poetry and prose looking for the terms that connect the texts to the literary period/s. We then turn our attention to the nature documentary Blue Planet II and explore how it uses cinematic effects to offer both social criticism of climate change and escapism and excitement, even while engaging with existential themes such as how animal gender roles contrast human ones, naked survival, grief and finding meaning in meaninglessness. After a round of documentary presentations that celebrate how students make each other stronger through kind, specific, and constructive feedback, we move on to written work. Students write an unplugged in-class essay on a postmodern short story about frogs that seems to be both about climate change, karma, and compassion in the face of the capitalist destruction of the natural world. We then return to the idea of self-reliance and individualism as expressed in Chris McCandless letter about his doomed Alaska trip, before we finish the unit by returning to the documentary genre – and frogs – with the YouTube-documentary “True Facts about the Frog”. This lets us explore how we might analyze humor and forms the basis for the students making their own humorous shorts with a focus on how human beings are animals too.
Key concepts include:
dominion, cultivation, custody, cinematic effects, framing, cutting, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, colour, mood, the modes of persuasion, settler, self-reliance, individualism, poetic genius, pantheism, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, dualism, the cult of childhood, nostalgic longing, industrialization, escapism, social criticism, existential themes, climate change, conflict, unnamed main character, compassion, humour, expectation-gap-surprise
Forløbet er vurderet til 60 siders arbejde.
Kernestof:
• Factory farming in 60 seconds flat, PETA, accessed 3/2 2025
• 7 Reasons Why You Should Stop Eating Meat Immediately, Olivia Petter, The Independent, 2017.docx
• The Tables Turned, William Wordsworth, 1798
• The Ecchoing Green, William Blake, 1789
• Excerpt from "Walden", Thoreau, 1854.docx
• 8 Clips from Blue Planet II, BBC Earth, YouTube, 2021
• "Amazing Clownfish Teamwork", Blue Planet II, BBC Earth, YouTube, 2021
• "Frogs", Tales From The Inner City, Shaun Tan, 2018
• Into the Wild, McCandless, 1992
• True Facts About The Frog, Ze Frank, YouTube, 2013
Supplerende stof:
• WORKSHEET 7 reasons why you should stop eating meat.docx
• "The Romantic Age, Literary Background", Back and Sigh, Through Literary Landscapes 2020
• "American transcendentalism", Through Literary Landscapes, Back and Sigh, 2020, 56
• "Blue Planet II Is the Greatest Nature Series Of All Time", Yong, The Atlantic 2018.docx
• "Human", Wikipedia 2018.docx
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