ENGL2400: Multicult Am Lit (52225)

Ford, Michael

TR 12:45 PM

Park Hall 0145

ENGL 2400: Multicultural American Literature

In this class, we will read novels, short stories, and poetry that address the complex relationship between humanity and nature.

My starting point for the class is a quotation from Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “In the wild weed / she is a citizen.”

Throughout the semester, we will try to answer questions such as

  • How do writers present the relationship between land, nature, and citizenship?
  • How do authors represent the environment’s effects on humanity and humanity’s effects on the environment?
  • What theories of aesthetics inform different ways of representing nature in literature, and how do those theories of presenting nature in writing relate to theories of visual art, landscape gardening, and ecology?  
  • Why do authors ascribe meaning or value to some places and not to others? For instance, why might an author value a well-tended garden more than a patch of weeds growing in a neglected part of a city?

We will read some works that address environmental issues such as pollution, habitat loss, and climate change directly, and others that deal with nature and the environment more as the setting for a story or an object of poetic contemplation. Furthermore, our discussions will not be limited to the presentation of nature in the texts we read; I want to investigate how writers interweave humanity and nature in their work, and I want to give students the freedom to explore and develop their own interests and analyses of literature.

Authors whose work we are likely to read include Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Ed Roberson, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Sze, Joy Harjo, Langston Hughes, dg nanouk okpik, and Toni Morrison.