ClassInfo

This course explores literary, artistic, scientific, and theoretical writing on the problem of human exploitation of the environment. In particular, it takes as its starting point ideas about nature founded in a colonial worldview and considers the continued influence of European political and philosophical ideas of nature and human nature. In developing our consideration of nature and human nature, we will read a wide range of texts in order to survey and sample various understandings of this relationship and of the imagination of "nature" - including what is often acknowledged as the "first" work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh; the Middle English dream vision, The Vision of Piers Plowman and its imagination of both the locus amoenus (a beautiful natural place) and the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden); understandings of nature in European political philosophy (Aristotle, Hobbes) and American poetry (Emily Dickinson); and various contemporary works on nature and the environment, including (but not limited to) those by Linda Hogan, Otobong Nkanga (Luster and Lucre), Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Walter Mignolo, Donna Haraway, Stacey Alaimo, Eva Hayward, Susanne Antonetta, Rachel Carson, Eli Clare, Anne-Lise François, and Lynn Nottage.