This course explores a wide range of writing by women on the environment. From life writing to environmental activism, mountaineering to falconry, mythology to botany, we explore how women have engaged with the natural world over the last two hundred years. Beginning with Dorothy Wordsworth's famous Grasmere Journal, a daily account of her life in the Lake District in England, we move briskly forward to read several of E. Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver, her retelling of Coast Salish legends, first published between 1909 and 1912, followed by Nan Shepherd's mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on her experience of fell walking in the Scottish Cairngorms, written during WW II but not published until the 1970s. We then consider the first wave of environmental activism, crystallized in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1962 as a series of articles exposing the dangers of widely used synthetic pesticides and later collected in book form. We then move forward to writing from our current century, with personal accounts of how women have interacted with nature, as well as explorations of the human impact on the environment, for better but far too often for worse. We read a range of genres and styles, from Robin Wall Kimmerer's short personal essays, to Helen Macdonald's memoir of training a hawk to overcome grief at her father's sudden death, to selections from Suzanne Simard's academic biography, Finding the Mother Tree, and Lauren Groff's novel of survival and adventure, Vaster Wilds. We also read essays by Sabrina Imbler and and Jamaica Kincaid that explore intersectional ecologies. Throughout, we will be considering the feminist implications of women writing about nature.

A tentative reading schedule is included below.

Please note: this is a blended course. In-person classes (lecture and tutorial) will be held six times in the term, on the following dates: Sept. 14, 28, Oct. 19, Nov. 2, 16, 30. You are expected to attend all of these in-person meetings, both lectures and tutorials. All other course materials and activities will be offered in canvas, chiefly in the form of audio lecture recordings, online discussions, and other learning activities.

Please purchase the three books listed below (The Living Mountain, H is for Hawk and Vaster Wilds) from your favourite bookseller or borrow them from a library; all other reading materials will be provided through online links or via canvas.

Tenative Reading Schedule

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
ISBN: 085786183

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