ENGL4835: Environmental Literature (57413)

Ford, Michael

TR 11:10 AM

Park Hall 136

In this course, we will read works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose that examine humanity’s relationship with and effects on the environment.

We will study a range of environmental writing—from pastoral poetry to apocalyptic narratives, from nature writing that describes the features of a narrow plot of land to meditations on the scale of our impact on global environmental systems—and we will consider those texts from a variety of critical perspectives. We will read works that endorse a clear division between humanity and the natural world and works that challenge the validity of those categories—humanity and nature. We will read works that despair at the state of the environment and works that look to the future with hope.

While the course will provide a survey of environmental literature of the past three centuries, we will begin and end the semester by considering environmental literature in the twenty-first century as well as literature’s capacity to illuminate the environmental issues of the present.

In addition to traditional study of literature, this class will involve reading our environment in relation to the written works we study. That is, we will examine the world around us and consider the ways our relationship with the environment is affected by the texts we read and the structures and spaces of our built environment.

We will pay particular attention to a few sites on the UGA campus, examining the kinds of practical and aesthetic interventions into ecology, geology, and hydrology they represent:

  • The Founder’s Garden behind Park Hall
  • Tanyard Branch, a small creek whose course is almost completely covered by the University of Georgia campus
  • The site of a water-powered textile mill known as the Athens Factory, now the UGA School of Social Work building, as well as the ruins of the dam in the North Oconee River that once contained the water that drove the mill’s machinery.

Authors whose work we are likely to read include William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Linda Hogan, Niyi Osundare, Octavia Butler, dg nanouk okpik, Ed Roberson, and Richard Powers.