Spring 2006 Courses

English 294: American Literature and the Environment (Shmurak)

M/W/F 3:40 - 4:30 pm, Old Main 111

How have Americans in the last three centuries understood their relationships to the land?  How has their thinking about the environment shaped not only their uses of it, but their ideas about themselves, their communities, and the nation as a whole?  This class examines American literary and cultural responses to the nation’s changing landscapes from the colonial period to the present.  We will consider a variety of subjects, including ideas about the American “wilderness,” urban development, suburbia, food production, and ecological conservation.  Drawing on literary, visual, and historical sources, we will investigate the ways Americans have viewed different environments, paying particular attention to how gender, ethnicity, and nation inflect their responses.  Texts will likely include works by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Caroline Kirkland, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Law Olmsted, Mary Austin, John Muir, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Upton Sinclair, Robert Frost, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Pynchon, and Rachel Carson, as well as a variety of secondary sources.

Spring 2006 Course Listings