Mar 29, 2024  
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog 
    
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 231-01 - American Literary Traditions III

4 credits (Spring)
From Silent Spring to Standing Rock: American Literature and the Environment. This course aims to provide a survey of environmental literature in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries, with special focus on environmental justice. We will consider how writers represent, reckon with, and challenge issues of wilderness, nature, toxicity, climate change, and environmental racism. We will ask what might be the role of the “environmental imagination,” to invoke the ecocritic Lawrence Buell, in the struggle for a more equitable and ecologically just world? Authors include, among others, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, Arthur Sze, Jesmyn Ward, and Layli Long Soldier. In addition to ecocritical approaches to literary study, there will be opportunities to create literary journalism and personal essays, to take field notes outdoors, learning to see and read what is around us in new ways. 

Prerequisite: ENG 120  or ENG 121  for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120  or ENG 121  or third-year standing.
Instructor: Phan