Being a 300-level course in English, this course requires that you produce at least 5,000 to 6,000 words of critical prose. You will have to do this over three papers each of approximately 1,500 words and two exams each of approximately 750 words. Another requirement of a 300-level course is that you do research for your three papers which you will cite according to MLA rules. This means both in-text citations and a bibliography. We will not spend class time going over MLA formatting and citation rules, so anyone who has any questions about this should make an appointment with a librarian who works with format and citation. 

The course does not pretend to cover all traditions and cultures of environmentalism. Though we will touch upon non-European traditions, such as Native American views of nature and environmentalism, this course will not cover them comprehensively. 

The focus here is literary rather than political or scientific. We will certainly talk about political environmentalism, about kinds of environmental activism, about the current state of climate change, the predictions of meteorologists, the actions governments are presently taking to slow the rate of global warming. However, we will talk about these as a way to put the literary texts we read into context. They will not be our main focus. 

Our main focus will be literature since the romantic period (1780 to the present) which conditions our ways of understanding and talking about the environment. For example, the romantic idea of "natural religion", that God or Spirit is immanent in nature, still shapes how we talk about nature. The ways in which we talk about pollution, wilderness, disaster, conservationism, environmentalism, sustainability, nature (as opposed to man-made), will all be addressed in works we read. We will read literature as works of imagination and language, but always with an eye on the environmental implications of what we are reading. 

We will read works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. There will be poems, memoirs, essays, and works of fiction, and our reading will always be mindful of these as distinct genres with particular ways of expressing ideas. 

This is a provisional schedule and will change before the course begin in September.

Week One

An introduction to the concepts of ecocriticism and environmental writing. (These will include nature versus the artificial, pollution, and environmentalism.) The aim will be to think about how these concepts often taken for obvious and for granted are in fact complicated constructions that merit questioning. 

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring. (We will not read this entire book. Page assignments will be posted.) 

Week Two

British romanticism and natural religion.  This week will look at ways in which English poets imagined God as immanent in nature, and nature to be a means by which to commune with God spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually. 

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley (prose and poetry in a packet) . 

Week Three 

American romanticism and transcendentalism. This week will look at Emerson's idea of human interaction with nature and Thoreau's famous retreat to Walden Pond. 

Emerson, Packet ("Nature," "Self-Reliance," poems) 

Thoreau Walden

Week Four

Thoreau, Walden

Week Five

The basic principle here is that the first step toward environmental consciousness is observation, attention to the environment. Further, that romantic, post-romantic, modern, and contemporary poetry in English offers a particularly rich variety of brilliant and sensitive approaches to looking at and experiencing nature, animals, and landscapes. 

Poetry of nature: Lawrence, Dickinson, Whitman, Bishop, Frost, Ammons, Moore, Jeffers,  Ted Hughes etc. 

Week Six

A continuation of week five: Snyder, Erdrich, Gluck, Berry, Dickey, and others. 

Week Seven

Like Thoreau, Edward Abbey retreated to relative isolation in nature and write about the experience. His memoir, Desert Solitaire, is often thought of as an updated version of Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Like Walden, it is a polemical work that criticizes the American, capitalist culture that threatens to deface the natural landscape. 

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. 

Week Eight

There is an already large and growing body of dystopian and science fiction writing about environmental disaster. Among these is Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower which brings together issues of pollution, global warming, and environmental mismanagement with issues of race and racism, gender inequality, social injustice, and economic inequality. 

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower. 

Week Nine

Atwood's Oryx and Crake is also set in a post-catastrophic future dystopia in which genetic engineering has gone awry and created dangerous hybrid creatures. The novel also deals with the gender construction, the oppression of women and human trafficking. 

Margret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. 

Week Ten 

Margret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Week Eleven 

Yet another novel set in a post-catastrophic world. Here the catastrophe is not named or explained, but a father and son fight to survive in a bleak landscape of scarcity. The novel explores human relationships under the stress of scarcity, the ethics of survival, human relationships with the environment. 

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Week Twelve

This novel published in 1896, if included in this course, is likely to come before week twelve. It is set in Maine and deals with the characters of a small town whose community and values are set in the context of their relationship with the natural landscape which is dominated by fir trees. 

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs. 

Week Thirteen

This recent novel by Turkish novelist Elif Shafak is a tentative addition to the course. It is not a novel that deals primarily or directly with environmentalist issues, but it does deal with spirituality in terms of relationships not only among humans, but also with nature. What recommends the novel for a course such as this one is the part of the novel which is written from the point of view of a fig tree, a narrative maneuver that asks us to consider sentient nature and non-human points of view. 

Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

Week Fourteen

A return to poetry in which there are human encounters with nature, mostly from the 20th Century: Niedeker, Williams, Arigo, Berry, Snyder, Frost, Moore, and others we have already looked at. 

Final Exam will be held in class at the time scheduled by the registrar