American Literary Landscapes

American Literary Landscapes is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies tutorial taught by Alan Hodder.

Course Description
In 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote, 'In wildness is the preservation of the world,' a declaration that subsequently became a slogan of the Sierra Club and a rallying crying for environmentalists everywhere. Thoreau?s writings about nature, particularly Walden, also helped inaugurate a vibrant tradition of nature writing in the United States. Yet, over the centuries, Americans have conceived of 'nature' in starkly different, often contradictory, ways. Where Puritans saw the New England landscape as 'a waste and howling wilderness,' Transcendentalists saw it as a spiritual refuge and source of inspiration. In hindsight, American literary representations of nature tell us as much about American religion, culture, and national ideology, as about the natural world itself. In this tutorial, we will examine assorted representations of nature in American literature, from colonial times till the present. Readings will be drawn from fiction, poems, and nonfiction essays produced by such disparate writers as Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, Thoreau, John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Aldo Leopold, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, and Barry Lopez.

Learning Goals

 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing