English 184 - Winter, 2011

Literature & the Environment

Class Information

Instructor: Ziser, Michael
CRN: 22573
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Location: 146 Olson

Description

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi recently unveiled a new vision plan that emphasizes “global environmental sustainability” as a major goal for the university. But what place is there for literature in such a vision? This course will explore the relation between environment, ecology, and the humanities, focusing on the ways that literature has helped shape attitudes and actions toward the nonhuman world--and been shaped itself in the process. We’ll move topically, examining crucial early distinctions between the natural world as a space of leisure or labor, freedom or servitude, spiritual cleansing or material pollution, contemplative solitude or collective action. Readings will range from Virgil and Milton’s classic pastorals to Sina Queyras’s attempt last year to write a pastoral of the freeway system; from James Grainger’s 18th-century manual on how to run a slave plantation to Michael Pollan’s 20th-century “gardener’s education”; from the antisocial Daniel Boone and the misanthropist Robinson Jeffers to the agrarian communities of Wendell Berry and Ruth Ozeki. On the shores of Walden Pond and in the trash heaps of Istanbul, from the perspectives of elephants and eco-terrorists, we’ll discover our own answers to the chancellor’s call.

Grading

regular quizzes (25% total)
2 papers (25% ea)
take-home final exam (25%)

Texts

Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics
Michael Pollan, Second Nature
Henry Thoreau, Walden
Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone
Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation
Don Mitchell, The Nature Notebooks
Marjorie Kinan Rawlings, The Yearling
Bill McKibben, ed., American Earth