Adventure Literature: Exploring the Literature of American Wilderness

Catalog description

The purpose of ENGL 181D -"Exploring the Literature of American Wilderness"-is to study the literature and ideas associated with American wilderness in an experiential context; that is, the heart of this course should be an extended backpacking trip into a federally protected wilderness preserve. So the basic assumption on which this course is founded is that our understanding of literature and other cultural concerns can be enhanced by knowledge of and experience in a place. To achieve its purpose, this course will expose students to the following: - The history of wilderness in American culture, including the ongoing political debate about the meaning, value, and place of wilderness/wildness in that culture. - A representative sampling of the writing that has been directly inspired by wilderness experience. - Philosophical ideas directly associated with wilderness experience. - The rudiments of safe and low-impact backcountry travel and the manner in which to engage in that travel most ethically. - The direct experience of legally protects wilderness itself. - An opportunity, however briefly, to experiment with the Thoreavian notion of "living deliberately." To accomplish this purpose, students will be asked to accomplish some reading and writing (of various types). In a version of this course previously offered, the exploration of the literary representation of wilderness over time-from Puritan historians and Enlightenment philosophers; to Thoreau, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt; to contemporary poets, novelists and literary journalists-is framed by reading Roderick Nash's standard history of wilderness in the United States, Wilderness and the American Mind