Our focus for this course will be upon how literature deals with the environment, i.e., how literary texts represent environmental issues and why it matters that they be represented in this form. How, that is, does where we live and, even more importantly, how we imagine the places in which we live, affect who we are? How do our relationships to nature and our relationships with other people intersect? We will be considering a range of prose texts, including fictional narratives, non-fictional essays and journalism, primarily texts written or set in the Americas, but with one African novel included for comparative purposes. Course goals include: 1) developing the analytical reading skills appropriate to different kinds of literary texts, 2) working on how to formulate and sustain critical arguments in writing, 3) learning how to uncover the logic and stakes of specific attitudes toward the natural world, 4) understanding how environmental issues are linked to other social and cultural concerns, 5) seeing how those linkages are affected by particular historical and political conditions. The course will contain a significant writing component, regular informal writing assignments, a collaborative analysis of a critical essay, and a collaborative group project on one of the primary texts in the course; it can count for W-credit.

Texts: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, Appleman, Norton Darwin, Butler, Wild Seed, Lopez, Arctic Dreams, Head, When Rain Clouds Gather.