This course examines the vital relationship between literature, the environment, and varieties of ecological perception in early American and nineteenth-century American literature. Drawing on ecocritical theory, the course will investigate different ways of seeing, sensing, writing, and expressing environmental relations in literature, with specific focus on the interface of ecology and literary form within different periods, genres, contexts, and styles. The class will begin with the ecological affordances of Native American oral literature and indigenous poetry, which we’ll read alongside ecocritical work by David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) and Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass). From there, we’ll examine ecological descriptions of the New World, New England, and the Black Atlantic; varieties of transcendentalist forms in Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau; traces of dark ecology and the ecogothic in Poe and Melville; the sublime and the picturesque in American landscape painting; and the ecological poetics of Whitman and Dickinson. We will also consider how these interfaces of ecology and literature relate to other media such as painting, music, film, and videogames. Throughout the course, we will work to unsettle our perceptions through comparative media analysis, drawing on ecocritical perspectives to analyze the diverse ecology of forms within, around, and through American literary history.
Course readings will likely include:
• Selections of Native American oral literature and indigenous poetry
• Thomas Harriet, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
• Selections from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
• Essays, poems, and nature writing by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James Fenimore Cooper, and Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Tracy Fullerton’s Walden, a Game
• Herman Melville, “The Encantadas” and selected stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Selected poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
• Visual art by the Hudson River School and Luminist landscape painters
• Screenings of The New World, First Cow, and Dead Man
• Ecocritical scholarship by William Cronon, David Abram, Laura Dassow Walls, Kate Riby, Dana Phillips, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others.
• Selections of Native American oral literature and indigenous poetry
• Thomas Harriet, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
• Selections from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
• Essays, poems, and nature writing by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James Fenimore Cooper, and Susan Fenimore Cooper
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Tracy Fullerton’s Walden, a Game
• Herman Melville, “The Encantadas” and selected stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Selected poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
• Visual art by the Hudson River School and Luminist landscape painters
• Screenings of The New World, First Cow, and Dead Man
• Ecocritical scholarship by William Cronon, David Abram, Laura Dassow Walls, Kate Riby, Dana Phillips, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others.
