English 230 - Fall, 2016

Study of a Major Writer

Class Information

Instructor: Ziser, Michael
CRN: 53677
Time: M 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies

Description

Thoreau and Environs

That recent New Yorker article denouncing him as “pond scum” and fingering his major work Walden as “the original cabin porn” notwithstanding, Henry David Thoreau was really not such a bad guy. In this seminar we will grapple with the entirety of his writings: from early pieces of journalism to translations of scripture to original poetry, essays, long nonfiction, and of course The Journal. (Pretty much everything except the recent collection Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats.) We will be careful to put Thoreau into the contexts of New England literary culture, “Transcendentalism” as a religious and literary phenomenon, antebellum natural history and agricultural writing, proto-environmentalism, abolitionism, pacifism, and the history of labor. Alongside scholars like Stanley Cavell, Wai Chee Dimock, Barbara Johnson, Peter Coviello, Nick Bromell, Rochelle Johnson, and others, we will explore questions surrounding Thoreau’s utility as a philosopher, his status as a translational node between East and West, his anticipation of contemporary materialist poetics, his queerness, and his influential mode of alienation. Significant attention will be paid to Thoreau’s immediate influences and contemporaries, as well as his evolving meaning in American culture since his death in 1862.


Sample Texts

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Walden
Cape Cod
The Maine Woods
Resistance to Civil Government and other Essays
Faith in a Seed
Wild Fruits
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds
Branka Arsić, Bird Relics
Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature

Texts

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, HDT
Walden, HDT
Cape Cod, HDT
The Maine Woods, HDT
Resistance to Civil Government and other Essays, HDT
Faith in a Seed, HDT
Wild Fruits, HDT
The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell
Seeing New Worlds, Laura Dassow Walls
Bird Relics, Branka Arsić
Thoreau’s Nature, Jane Bennett
The Senses of Walden, Stanley Cavell