ENGL 124 - Literature and the Environment (W)

3 Credit(s)

The literary imagination has depicted the natural world in varied ways—as untamed wilderness, pastoral ideal, scenic and sublime landscapes, and the damaged and threatened environment of industrialized society. Whenever human impact on the non-human environment has changed, authors have continued re-imagining nature’s significance and rethinking relationships between environment, self and society. In this course, students explore how the natural environment gets mythologized, celebrated, altered, lost, lamented, and recovered in works of classic and contemporary literature. The course investigates the work of nature writing as genre—its common tropes, archetypes, and aesthetic strategies. Students use literary interpretation as a lens for seeing and reflecting on a range of environmental issues such as sustainability, ecology, urbanization, pollution, overpopulation, consumerism, tourism, climate change, animal rights, and land stewardship. They are also asked to situate their own experience of nature into environmental discourse.
This course contributes toward satisfying the humanities distribution requirement. All sections are writing enriched. Satisfies a humanities general education requirement for non-majors. Students pursuing majors that require ENGL 102 should register for ENGL 102, and consult with advisors to identify the theme and focus for their preferred section. Once the 102 requirement has been completed, students may register for a course from ENGL 115 to ENGL 125 to fulfill a humanities general education requirement, as long as a different theme and focus is chosen. Students whose majors do not require ENGL 102 may register for sections of ENGL 115–ENGL 125 to fulfill a humanities general education requirement.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 101 or ENGL 103 or equivalent. Students who have taken ENGL 103 may take ENGL 115–ENGL 125 for humanities distribution credit.