ABSTRACT
Covering new ground In this chapter the concept of new media for English is used both in the sense of media that represent unfamiliar subject territory for English and in the specialised sense of new digital media (digital texts with interactive potential1). Ecocritics have already explored unfamiliar subject territory for literary studies in addressing Lawrence Buell’s proposal of a new literary canon of nature writers (Buell 1995). Whereas Buell has since widened his view of ecocritical reading, he has succeeded in raising the profile of many types of nature writing, particularly works of non-fiction. These can suggest new paths for English particularly in terms of the teaching of poetry and nature writing. Recently ecocritics have gone beyond nature writing and have begun to consider cultural works such as films, nature documentaries and video games. These texts could form part of the range of reading2 required in the ‘renewed’ national curriculum (DCSF and QCA 2007), which for the first time explicitly requires the study of multimodal texts.3 The inclusion of multimodal texts implies engagement with new media genres such as websites, online stories, multimedia artworks, digital games and CD-ROMs, which involve the combination of a range of modes including ‘words, images and sound’ (DCSF and QCA 2007: 88).
