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AMERICAN NATURE WRITING

SPRING, 2001
ENGL  3047
I hope I do not need to spend many pages defending the reasonableness of the claim that 'we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization' [From Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995), citing Albert Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,269:(2)].
Grading
Papers 30%

6 weekly short papers (2 typewritten, double-spaced pages minimum); 12 page final paper. You may want to check Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. You will find some on-line sources there.
Attendance 25%

I take absences personally. After every class I give a grade for class participation: X=absent; D=present but without book; answers show that the reading hasn't been done; C=present with book and basically attentive; B=able to answer questions; A=able to give answers that show insight and appreciation. Four unexcused absences gives you an F for class participation (all you have to do is speak to me, I don't need documents). Six unexcused absences is an automatic D for the course.
Weekly Quizzes 20%

Specifically on the hand-outs "Glossary," and "History," as well as on current readings.
Final 25%

The final examination will be essay-questions.
Readings

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, 1782. Ed. Albert E. Stone.

Henry David Thoreau. Nature Essays.

John Muir. The Mountains of California, 1894.

Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac, 1949.

Loren Eiseley. The Immense Journey. Vintage, 1957.

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring, 1962.

John McPhee. The Pine Barrens, 1967.

Lewis Thomas. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher.

Wendell Berry. Home Economics
Extracts

Gilgamesh

 Because of the evil that is in the land, we will go to the forest and destroy the evil; for in the forest lives Humbaba whose name is Hugeness, a ferocious giant." But Enkidu sighed bitterly and said, "When I went with the wild beasts ranging through the wilderness I discovered the forest; its length is ten thousand leagues in every direction. Enlil has appointed Humbaba to guard it and armed him in sevenfold terrors, terrible to all flesh is Humbaba. When he roars it is like the torrent of the storm, his breath is like fire, and his jaws are death itself. He guards the cedars so well that when the wild heifer stirs in the forest, though she is sixty leagues distant, he hears her. What man would willingly walk into that country and explore its depths? I tell you, weakness overpowers whoever goes near it: it is not an equal struggle when one fights with Humbaba; he is a great warrior, a battering-ram. (The Epic of Gilgamesh).

Socrates

 You must forgive me, dear friend; I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.(Plato, Phaedrus 230d)

Charles Taylor

 The belief that thinking beings are part of a vast physical order can awaken a kind of awe, wonder, even natural piety. The reflection which moves us is that thought, feeling, moral aspirations, all the intellectual and spiritual heights of human achievement, emerge out of the depths of a vast physical universe which is itself, over most of its measureless extent, lifeless, utterly insensitive to our purposes, pursuing its path by inexorable necessity. The awe is awakened partly by the tremendous power of this world which overshadows us. We sense our utter fragility as thinking reeds, in Pascal's phrase; but we also feel it before the extraordinary fact that out of this vast blind silence, thought, vision, speech can evolve. (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989, p. 347)

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

 No other nation equaled the American people in their paradoxical ability to devastate the natural world and at the same time mourn its passing. (Man and Nature in America, New York: Columbia UP, 1963, p. 189)

Lewis Thomas

 Human beings simply cannot go on as they are now going, exhausting the earth's resources, altering the composition of the earth's atmosphere, depleting the numbers and varieties of other species upon whose survival we, in the end, depend. It is not simply wrong, it is a piece of stupidity on the grandest scale for us to assume that we can simply take over the earth as though it were part farm, part park, part zoo, and domesticate it, and still survive as a species. (The Fragile Species, New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1992: 122.)

Lawrence Buell

 Among the achievements of late nineteenth-century realism, the environmental nonfiction of Celia Thaxter, Mary Austin, and John Burroughs counts for as much as the novels of William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. Among intellectual developments during the Depression and World War II, Aldo Leopold's formation of a biocentric environmental ethics was as important as any. In the Cold War era, ecocide was always a more serious threat than nuclear destruction. In literary history since World War II, the resurgence of environmental writing is as important as the rise of magical realist fiction. (The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature, Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995.)
Overview
This course is a literature course with a theme. The texts are literary texts. But the literature nature is not like most imaginative literature, which invents its information, makes it up, fictionalizes. Nature writing, on the other hand, is expected to convey accurate information about the natural world, specifically by bringing to light unnoticed aspects of the natural world, the interactions of various ecosystems. It is, at some level or other, scientific, though it is important to remember that it is also literary, and literature is meant to give pleasure. Early nature writers were scientific amateurs. Today the best nature writing has solid grounding in both evolutionary and ecological theory, and many of the writers are themselves scientists. Moreover, a science-grounded appreciation of nature is something all citizens are going to have to acquire simply for the survival of our species. This involves consideration of such philosophical issues as mankind's place in nature, as well as the ethical responsibilities of humanity in the preservation of the environment. You should visit the homepage of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, mentioned above, and then read some of the Introduction to Ecocriticism  articles.  See also Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History from the National Humanities Center. There are three thematic sections: Native Americans and the Land, Wilderness and American Identity, and The Use of the Land (From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/).
Syllabus
1 J30 Introduction: The Peaceable Kingdom.  Assignment: Read Genesis, Job, and the Puritans (handouts).
2 F2 Genesis, Job, begin the Puritans.
3 F6 The Puritans. Quiz 1. History: Wild nature in the minds of: ancient peoples, the people of the Bible, Greece and Rome, Scandinavia, the Far East. Glossary: Wilderness (recaps some of the History). Assignment: Read J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer,1782.
4 F9 Crèvecoeur.
5 F13 Crèvecoeur. Quiz 2. Glossary: animism, anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, biosphere, commons.
6 F16 Crèvecoeur. Assignment: Read Thoreau, Natural History Essays.
7 F20 Thoreau. Quiz 3. Glossary: creation, creationism, deep time, design, ecology.
8 F23 Thoreau.
9 F27 Thoreau. Quiz 4. History: Pastoral, medieval ideas, Francis of Assisi, the Puritans. Assignment: Read John Muir, The Mountains of California.. See the John Muir Centre, and on the Sierra Club home page, see the John Muir Exhibit.
10 M2 Muir.
11 M6 Muir. Quiz 5. History: Enlightenment developments, the pioneer sense of wild nature, nationalist wilderness. Assignment: Read Aldo Leopold, The Sand County Almanac. You may want to visit the site of  The Nature Conservancy.
12 M9 Leopold.
13 M13 Leopold. Quiz 6. Glossary: ecosystem, environment, evolution, extinction, great chain of being.
14 M16 Leopold. Assignment: Read Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey. In connection with Eiseley, you might want to find out more about Becoming Human (human evolution), through this on-line documentary. You might also find interesting Science Writing and Narrative by Joseph Comprone, as well as the Editors Preface to the 1962 Time Reading Program Edition of The Immense Journey. Finally, there is an interview with Eiseley by Peggy Langstaff.
15 M27 Eiseley. Quiz 7. History: Transcendentalist ideas, George Perkins Marsh, conservation or preservation, Gifford Pinchot.
16 M30 Eiseley.
17 A3 Eiseley. Quiz 8. Glossary: inheritance of acquired characteristics, materialism, mechanistic, miracle, natural history. Assignment: Read Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.
18 A6 Carson.
19 A10 Carson. Quiz 9. Glossary: natural law, natural religion, nature/supernature, nature/technology-art, nature/culture-history.
20 A13 Carson. Assignment: Read John McPhee. The Pine Barrens. You may want to listen to McPhee speak. Click on "Listen to McPhee."
21 A17 McPhee. Bibliography of scholarly articles about McPhee at CentralBooking.com. See also: McPhee in the New York Times, and George P. Landow's brief essay, Acts of Interpretation: John McPhee.  As for the Pine Barrens themselves, here is An Insider's Tour, and a guide to the Plants of the New Jersey Pine Barrens along with links. Finally, here is Michael Hogan's Fine Art Photography of Southern New Jersey. Quiz 10. Glossary: Newtonian universe, noble savage, organic, pantheism, pastoral.
22 A20 McPhee. Assignment: Read Lewis Thomas. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. For a helpful set of illustrations of the cell click here Types of cells and click on the "Types of Cells" box.
23 A24 Thomas. A biographical sketch of Thomas by James K. Gude, MD; and an interview, A strong voice on a fragile subject: Lewis Thomas and the world we share, by Peggy Langstaff on the occasion of the publication of The Fragile Species. Finally, a despairing essay by Thomas, "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony." Quiz 11. Glossary: pastoral ideal, pastoral design, pathetic fallacy, picturesque, primitive.
24 A27 Thomas.
25 M1 Thomas. Quiz 12. Glossary: savage, social Darwinism, sociobiology, soul, sublime. Assignment: Read Wendell Berry. Home Economics. Biography and bibliography. Interview with Berry.
26 M4 Berry.
27 M8 Berry. Quiz 13. Glossary: succession, taxonomy, teleology, wilderness-biblically, wilderness-medieval mind.
28 M11 Berry.