ENG 411 - Ecocriticism

Semester Hours: 4

This course will be devoted to developing a critical vocabulary and a range of methodologies for thinking, writing, and talking about the relationship between literature and the environment. We’ll work through such issues as the cultural construction of nature and/or landscape; the poetics and politics of nature writing; the idea of wilderness; land as a readable text; land as economic and spiritual resource; environmentalist politics; intersections between environmentalism and other political or theoretical movements or schools (such as feminism); “green” pedagogy; gender and nature; connections between land and community (or land and race, land and ethnicity); construction of space; definitions of terms such as “nature,” “environment,” “ecology,” “wilderness,” “landscape,” and “ecocriticism”; and the phenomenon that Yi Fu Tuan called “topophilia,” or love of place.