Author: Stuart Glennan

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.

At this link you will find STS courses Spring 2014, both core course and electives.   You should use this list for your planning.  (Course search currently lists some STS courses incorrectly; I will let you know when I’ve got that fixed.)

As you plan your schedule, here are some things to keep in mind:

• If you haven’t taken ST200, take it.
• If you have taken ST200, consider taking ST320, which satisfies the STS core, and also can count as an elective if you have already taken ST330.  If you are a junior or senior, you can take both concurrently.
• Natural world courses: We have slightly changed our rules regarding NW courses in STS.  You may count one course toward your 15 hours of the STS science requirement.  Additionally, you may take selected NW courses to count as STS electives (though you cannot count a single course to both requirements).  The courses that can be used as NW electives are on the course list, and only a single NW course can count towards your elective requirement.
• Prerequisites: Please note that a good number of our electives have pre-requisites in the disciplines where they are taught.  If you don’t have the pre-requisites and you are interested in the course, you can contact the instructor to see if they will waive the requirement.  If you see a set of courses that you are interested in that you might take in a future semester (say if you are interested in economics courses on health care or energy), you should consider taking the pre-requisites now so you can enroll in a later term.

Please try to make one of the STS advising meetings.  We’ll have lots to talk about.