North American Literature and Ecology

This course explores how North American authors have been conceptualizing nature and the environment and introduces students to the most recent debates in environmental humanities, with special emphasis on such fields of inquiry as ecopoetics, geopoetics, and ecocriticism.

This course explores how North American authors have been conceptualizing nature and the environment and introduces students to the most recent debates in environmental humanities, with special emphasis on such fields of inquiry as ecopoetics, geopoetics, and ecocriticism. Looking at ecologically-oriented literary practices in historical perspective, it problematizes the mainstream idea of nature writing and explores experimental forms of depicting the entanglements of humans and more-than-human nature in North American literature. We will look at a variety of responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene across fiction, poetry, and documentary forms, exploring such concepts as pollution and waste, pastoral, wilderness, apocalypse, migrations, or nature-culture.

The authors whose work we will discuss include W.S. Merwin, Lorine Niedecker, Gary Snyder, Juliana Spahr, Forrest Gander, Ed Sanders, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia E. Butler.

Upon completion of this course, students should:

- understand the relationship between American literature and ecology in historical perspective

- gain knowledge about the discussed works and the historical contexts in which they were created

- be familiar with the most recent developments in enviornmental humanities

- display an increased fluency in close reading and text analysis

- display an increased ability to critically engage with literary texts

All students must participate actively in the course, completing the assigned readings before they are scheduled to be discussed in class. Active class participation – which includes thorough preparation for every meeting, involvement in class discussions and research projects, seeking guidance from the instructor when necessary – is as significant for each student’s final grade as their written assignments. This means that students are expected to work for their final grade consistently throughout the semester.

The total percentage of each student’s final grade will be determined according to the following scale:

30% class participation

40% response papers and in-class presentations

30% final essay