Dora Carrington, Yegen 'landscape', 1924.

 

In this course we will consider a selection of writings--prose, poetry, memoir, fiction--which take nature or its preservation as some major portion of their focus, in the context of some modern views of “ecology,” preservation, animal rights, urban and agricultural planning, and other issues of current concern. We will ask what some authors of the past considered a balanced relationship between humans and their natural environment, whether their views differ from those of more recent writers, and what forms of contemporary writing engage these issues.

For theoretical background we will discuss selections from Carolyn Merchant’s Radical Ecology, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and Wes Jackson’s Becoming Native to This Place. For British literary responses to nature, urban growth and the treatment of animals, we will consider selections from Home at Grasmere by William and Dorothy Wordsworth; poems by John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, essays by John Ruskin, William Morris and Ebenezer Howard; and Morris’s utopian romance News from Nowhere and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.

Readings by nineteenth and early-twenieth century American authors will include essays by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin. The final section of the course will be devoted to recent works of memoir and fiction such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge. We will also consider how writings by Native Americans, such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Sacred Water and Linda Hogan’s Power, represent the relation between Native peoples and the land they inhabit.

Attendance is required. Students will be asked to post internet journals, prepare a class presentation on a topic of their choice, and write three 5 page essays.

Prof. Florence S. Boos - 8:179 - Spring 2002