Literature and the Environment: Another STS elective

I just realized that we had failed to share with you another course for spring  2014 that can serve as an STS elective.  This looks very interesting — especially for those of you interested in environmental studies.

EN393: Into the Wild – Literature and the Environment

This class will explore wilderness and its relationship to human culture. Our concern throughout will be on a concept, the idea of wilderness, as it evolves in the nature writing tradition. We tend to think of wilderness spatially, as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act of 1964). And we will examine wilderness in terms of specific locales: John Muir’s Sierra, Edward Abbey’s red-rimmed deserts, the old-growth forests of Gary Snyder’s far west, Barry Lopez’s arctic, the archipelagic outposts of Robert MacFarlane’s Britain. For these and other writers from H. D. Thoreau to Aldo Leopold, wilderness offered in turns scenery, solitude, spiritual communion, recreation, and scientific study, and their experiences encourage us to think wilderness in different terms. Might we not consider wilderness temporally: does a familiar place become wild in the deep pitch of night? Or in terms of climate: is a snow-clad peak more wild than that same height greened by wildflowers? To what extent is wilderness a state of mind?

We will also take up recent responses to the received notion of wilderness. Kathleen Jamie provides a feminist critique of a strain of wilderness writing by what she calls the “lone enraptured male,” while Evelyn White reminds us that how we think about the wild is shaped by gender and race. The very idea of wilderness as a place where “man is a visitor who does not remain” is challenged by Luther Standing Bear and Leslie Marmon Silko, who attest to a long native American inhabitance of these lands. Moreover, recent work by ecologists and cultural geographers has suggested that the primeval wilderness we associate with the European settlement of North America is a historical aberration. Today, as wilderness continues to bleed from the world, we will ask ourselves how nature writing might re-wild our own imaginations.