C LIT 596 A: Special Studies In Comparative Literature

w/ ENGL 554
This course will be an introduction into practical ecocriticism, focusing on narrative as a genre, the 18th-20th centuries as a time span, and the global lineages of Euro-American environmental thought.  Although we will be reading some basic texts in narrative theory (likely from a reader) and dealing with issues of narrative representation (what it means to represent the world as story), most of our time will be spent upon primary literary and philosophical texts drawn from three distinct historical moments: 1) the Romantic era (Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth); 2) the Victorian period (Darwin, Nietzsche); 3) the contemporary epoch (let’s call it the Anthropocene), fabulations of various kinds that deal with how to represent nature upon a global, endangered planet (Animal’s Children from India, The Swan Book from Australia, and a third novel to be determined by class consensus).  
Two required class presentations (with written hand-outs); two options for writing: a series of single-spaced, one-page, no-margin papers or a single final paper on a topic selected in consultation with the instructor.