ENGL 294 - Topics in Environmental Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Spring

Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. Studies in the literature of natural history, exploration, and science pertaining to the fundamental relationships between nature and human culture. Versions of this course focus on particular periods and national literatures, or they concentrate on a specific theme or problem. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Winter 2015 topic:

ENGL 294-01: Topics in American Literature: American Environmental Poetry (3). In this course we read a selection of works by American poets from the seventeenth century to the present, but the majority of our readings are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We ask how “nature poetry” becomes “environmental poetry,” and what the difference in terminology signifies. We develop skills in formal and thematic analysis of poems. We ask how we read poems from different periods both within their own historical context and within our present historical context. Poets include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Simon Ortiz, and Pattiann Rogers. (HL) Warren