Problems in American Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Ziser, Michael
CRN: 62296
Time: T 3:10-6:00pm
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier American
Focus: Genre, Interdiscipline, Method
Description
Early American Environmental Cultures
Fulfills English PhD Earlier American historical distribution requirement
Fulfills English PhD Focus requirement Genre, Method, or Interdiscipline
Counts towards the Environmental Humanities Designated Emphasis
Readings in English, with opportunities for research forays in Spanish, French, and other relevant colonial and native archives.
Students from all literature, history, and other humanities programs welcome.
This seminar explores a range of cultural forms created to depict, digest, or control the nonhuman world in North America and the Caribbean from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Subjects will include: the first rendering of the ?New World? into European verbal and cartographic forms (and indigenous counter representations); cultural exchanges around specific environmental practices; the early rhetoric of extraction; the development of natural history writing and illustration; various theories of environmental determination; nascent travel literature and the growth of regional identities; the intertwinement of agriculture and food cultures; the plantation as paradigm and exception; and extinction.
Core readings will be historical texts and secondary materials drawn from the period, but our meetings will be structured to encourage students to bring materials from their own fields and periods of interest into the weekly conversation and the final projects.
Representative Readings:
(actual readings will be excerpted from texts like the below and other contextualizing materials; all will be available as digital texts)
Primary:
Thomas Hariot, Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1585)
James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane (1764)
[Anon.], The Panther Captivity (1794)
William Bartram, Travels (1791)
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
John James Audubon, The Birds of America (1827)
Secondary:
Monique Allewaert, Ariel's Ecology (2015)
Allison Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (2020)
Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness (2010)
Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History (1999)
Mary Kuhn, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in 19th-Century America (2023)
Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (2020)
Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (2017)
Timothy Sweet, Extinction and the Human (2021)