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.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 101 or ENGL 103