Literature and the Environment

Offered every term. Introduction to the field of literary studies, to the conventions of literary analysis, and to the literature option for English majors. Reading, writing, and research skills will be stressed, along with interpretative approaches to major genres within the field.

Course is designed to introduce students to the many discourses of nature. In this course we will approach “natural history” as a complex literary genre grounded in personal experience of the “more-than-human” world (in David Abram’s now ubiquitous phrase). While the study of natural history writing has historically focused on authors like Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs (as prominent practitioners of the personal narrative essay that explores the natural world), a more thorough understanding of the genre requires consideration of the role race, class, and gender play in shaping discourses of nature. Further, consideration of non-Anglo-American traditions (including, for example, a range of Native American and Asian “literary” practices) expands our understanding of those traditions as it allows us to see the Anglo-American tradition in useful perspective.

Offered every term. Representative texts from the pre-colonial period through the Civil War.

Offered every term. Representative texts from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century.

Offered every term. Prereq. or coreq., 12 credits of lower-division English courses. Study of various literary theories and their application to literary texts.

Offered autumn and spring. Prereq., LIT 300 or consent of instr. A survey of selected Shakespeare plays emphasizing close reading of the texts and consideration of their dramatic possibilities.

Offered autumn. Prereq., LIT 210L or 211L (ENLT 224L or 225L) and LIT 300 (ENLT 301) or consent of instr. Study of major texts and issues in American nature writing.

This course gives students a set of advanced learning opportunities to engage with Anglophone texts on the general theme of nature and culture, applying an ecocritical lens to extended literary analysis. Drawing from various periods and from various trans-Atlantic national literatures, the course is designed to focus on the emerging critique of nature and culture that questions foundational structures of epistemology and economy, animate and inanimate, civilization and wilderness.

Prereq., or coreq., LIT 300. This course surveys the developing field of ecocriticism, introducing students to the major issues and methodologies entailed in the study of literature and the environment.