In our present age of climate change, ecological crisis, worsening air, water, and land pollution, and the lingering effects of the global catastrophe of Covid-19, literature has an increasingly urgent role to play. We are grappling more than ever with how we write about and represent the stories of our permeable relation with a beautiful and sustaining natural world whose ecological balance is under threat. Centered on British and American writing from roughly 1880-1945, this course will seek to foster insight about the ways in which modernist literatures imagined and portrayed the effects of the post-industrial world on the “natural.”
We will focus on poetry and fiction by writers such as Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and Rainer Maria Rilke as we engage with how they render landscapes, waterscapes, cityscapes, natural environments, and both human and non-human animals. We will also read contemporary eco-critical theory and familiarize ourselves with 21st-century ecological organizations, all the while addressing the crucial role literary studies has to play within these struggles.
Course Requirements: Final Essay; Engaged Participation and Attendance; Presentation
