Course Texts:

About the course:

Our focus for this course will be upon how literature deals with the environment, i.e., how literary texts represent nature and how they present environmental issues, and why it matters that these issues be represented in this form. How, that is, does where we live and how we imagine ourselves within those places affect who we are? This will not be a course on nature writing or on social science/public policy issues, although our concerns will intersect in numerous ways with both perspectives. Instead, we will be studying how particular aesthetic and rhetorical elements get used by different authors to shape our attitudes toward nature and the environment.

My main goal in this course is to work toward reading the texts we will be covering—a set including fictional narratives, non-fictional essays, journalism, critical essays, and a bit of poetry, selected from different historical and cultural settings—more closely and more carefully. Each of the texts we will consider represents one or more stances toward the environment, varying senses of what the world around us is, how it works, why it is the way it is, and what that means for us as human beings. Moreover, each of the texts also deals with the environment as it bears upon social relations; collectively, they let us explore how our attitudes toward nature and toward other people intersect. As we read them, it is important to remember that even the literary texts among them are not simply descriptive accounts of what particular authors see around themselves. They are acts of persuasion, implicit arguments about how we should think and feel and behave that are often all the more effective for the implicitness of their positions. Such texts can thus play an important role in how particular societies think about environmental issues; they help shape the deep base of beliefs and values that frame political debates about public policies.

As we examine these different texts, we’ll be focusing on what it means to read them well in a literary sense. Yet most kinds of discourse make extensive use of “literary” strategies, deploying narrative, imagery, allegory, and other elements typical of literature to help them achieve their rhetorical purposes. It is rare that scientific expertise proves to be the sole determining factor even for what one might construe as scientific issues—the reality of global warming, for instance, or the decision on whether to protect a specific endangered species. It is even rarer for politicians or bureaucrats to refrain from the slanting of perspective that rhetoric can provide (thus the recent renaming of global warming as “climate change”). So the analysis we will practice in this class is in an important way transferable to other, non-literary contexts.

Your writing provides the best measure of how well you can perform the kinds of analytical reading I will expect from you. Everyone will submit several response papers during the quarter, meant to help you focus in a preliminary way your reaction to specific texts and to help me gauge how you are responding to them collectively. For your formal, graded work you will have two options—either doing a single long paper at the end of the term or a series of shorter essays (see details below). We will, moreover, be addressing writing issues with some regularity throughout the quarter in class, and I encourage you to see me at any time with questions you may have about specific assignments.

Course Requirements:

1) Regular attendance and participation are, of course, taken for granted in a graduate seminar. I will expect you to have read and to have thoughtful questions and comments to make about whatever material we are dealing with on a specific day. Everyone will, in addition, be responsible for submitting five response papers during the quarter—2-page, double-spaced responses to a particular day’s reading. I will provide writing prompts for many of these, but will sometimes leave it up to you to decide on a topic. You can choose which of these, from among the 18 or so occasions, you wish to complete.

2) You will have two options for completing your written work for the course, either writing a series of six short papers on individual works we are reading or a single, longer paper to be submitted at the end of the quarter. Given the short time frame of an academic quarter, I’d like you to inform me which option you have chosen by the end of week 2 of class (October 7). 

a) Option A involves writing six one-page, single-spaced, no-margin papers. Five of these can be on any of the main texts we will be reading and will typically be due a day or two after we complete our discussion of that text. One of them, however, will be different—a collaborative paper dealing with one of the critical essays included in the back of our edition of Robinson Crusoe. There are two goals for this sixth paper; the first is to give you practice in the critical assessment of secondary literature by focusing on a single essay, the second is to have you perform this assessment collaboratively, working with someone else to sharpen your reading of a specific critical essay. 

b) Option B involves writing a 16-18 page seminar paper, due at the end of the quarter, on one of the texts we have read and on a topic to be selected in consultation with me.  This paper should involve significant secondary research; I encourage you to submit an outline or draft of your paper early enough to get feedback before the final due date.

Graded Work:

Attendance, participation, response papers -- 1/6 of final grade

Short papers    -- 1/6 of final grade each

Final paper    -- 5/6 of final grade

Required Readings:

All texts for the course are available either at the University Book Store or in a course reader available at the Ave Copy Center, downstairs at 4141 University Ave.