English 112: The Environmental Imagination: Green Writing and Ecocriticism

SUBJECT:

Not "nature writing" in the old-fashioned sense of descriptions of wildlife and scenery, but the interface between something we call "nature" or "the natural world" on the one hand, and literary imagination on the other. This includes attention to nature as a subject of writing, nature as a product of writing, and nature as a tool, source, site for thinking and writing.

QUESTIONS:

How can the literary imagination influence the ways in which a culture understands the natural environment? How are we likely to think about the natural world if we have learned our attitudes from Rachel Carson? Annie Dillard? Edward Abbey? Leslie Marmon Silko?

What alternative models do writers offer for the relations between humans and the natural environment? (e.g. conquest, collaboration, awe, love)

What is the relation, if any, between green writing and environmentalism?

How do writers use the resources of language--voice, metaphor, genre, literary form--to convey ideas, feelings, impressions about the natural environment?

How do they use the natural environment as a vehicle for other agendas? (religious thought, political thought, sentimentalism, . . .)

GOALS :

A better understanding of the way one kind of writing interacts with its subject.

Some familiarity with key texts and issues in green writing and ecocriticism.

A sense of the possibilities the natural environment holds out to writers and the services writers can perform for the natural environment.

CHALLENGES/PROBLEMS

Environmentalism, environmental writing, and elitism (classism, racism)

The temptations of vagueness (mere awe; easy "spirituality")

Environmentalism and the city; environmental jjustice

Global environmentalism