Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores issues across nineteenth century literature and culture in a variety of genres and media from diverse geopolitical regions organized by various critical questions and approaches. Students with credit for ENGL 435 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Nineteenth-Century Literary Ecologies  

“Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her”                 
   --William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey (1798)  

“Nature, red in tooth and claw
…shriek’d against [God’s ] creed”                      
   --Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)  

“By the plague-wind
every breath of air you draw
is polluted, half round the world”          
   --John Ruskin, “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884)    

This course examines nineteenth-century literature from an ecological perspective. We will consider how writers “saw” or represented nature and the environment through the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Steam and into the era of coal and oil that continues to shape our world today. Our reading list traces a developing worldwide web of mass communication that forged ever-tighter links between the geographic center of British Empire - England and London - and peripheries like South Africa, central Canada and British Columbia. We will consider how the emergence of mass culture depended on vast amounts of resources drawn from around the world, such as flax and later wood for paper, coal for fuel, water and wind for steam. We will develop ways of thinking about real and imagined environments by exploring how nineteenth-century authors understood the limits of nature, especially the ways they saw the natural world inextricably entangled with culture, society, and political systems, and bound up with colonial power. We will reflect along with them on what nature, including human nature, was and is - and, indeed, what new natures may be. We will engage the period’s energetic debates on the consequences of industrial and colonial practices together with the sense of alarm, even crisis and doom, as well as unspecified mourning and unaccountable loss connected with destruction of natural environments. Most importantly, we will ask why and how these formulations matter today.  

Note: We will also be reading contemporary environmental, postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory as we attempt to develop a working definition of such terms as “nature” and "environment."

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: