Literature and the Environment

Catalog description

This course provides an overview of Anglophone environmental literature of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, focusing specifically on texts and cultural histories that may inform our understanding of current environmental problems. Taking the term “environment” in the widest sense possible (i.e., as referring to human as well as more-than-human environments), we’ll consider how environmental concerns have shaped literary innovation, and how literature has conversely come to influence environmental discourse. To this end, while tracking shifting attitudes toward “nature” and the “environment,” we’ll read foundational and lesser-known works associated with British romanticism, American transcendentalism, wilderness and conservation literature, New Deal-era progressive politics, postcolonial critique, the modern environmental movement, environmental justice, cli-fi, and eco-poetics. We will also bring to bear on these works vital sociological and theoretical frameworks foregrounding Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, women’s, and working-class thought and experiences