ENGL 12020 - Stuff: Lit & Material Objects

Course Credit: 1
(ENVS)
“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important,” said Rachel Carson, “simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.” In this course, we will explore how literary works reflect-and transform-attitudes toward nature. Our reach will be expansive in time and space, encompassing Old English epics, Romantic poetry and prose, frontier fiction, global environmental justice writing, and contemporary North American science fiction. As we practice the basic skills of literary analysis, we will continue to ask how literary works shape our sense of the nonhuman world. Major texts will include Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, and Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake. We will also read shorter pieces by Mary Rowlandson, J. Hector St. John de Créveceour, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Derek Walcott, and Juliana Spahr, among others. English majors and minors may take a second English 120xx for credit, but it will not count as one of the required electives for the major or the minor. [AH]