English 221 - Reading the Landscape

TTh 9-10:20

Dean Flower

No prerequisites. Open to majors and non-majors. Anyone in the Landscape Studies Program or the Environmental Studies Program will find the course useful.

It is easy enough to see that literature may depict landscape or reflect our attitudes toward it, harder perhaps to see that it also creates, gives shape to, even designs landscape. After all, what makes land into landscape is the act of seeing. Or in this case envisioning landscape in words. This course is designed to explore how literature provides unique ways of conceptualizing, evoking, reshaping , inscribing , and evaluating landscape. It will emphasize the work of American writers who have come after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and have addressed, both directly and indirectly, some of the more urgent issues of preservation, ecology, wilderness, and sustainability-Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Oliver, and others. The course will also look back to the 19 th century for a sampling of writers still influential in modern ecological writing, particularly Thoreau but also Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and Mary Austin.

Writing assignments will require some analysis of the literature and some original response-i. e., meditating on a well-known place, encountering an alien landscape, writing an "exact" description of a place, arguing an environmental cause-drawing on the course readings for models of style and method.

Probable Texts:

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (personal narrative)

Mary Oliver, Winter Hours (essays & poems)

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace (essays)

H. D. Thoreau, Walden

The Nature Reader , ed. Halpern & Frank, (selections from Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Mattheissen, Gretel Ehrlich, Leslie Silko, Gary Snyder, Guy de la Valdene, and others)

Additional xeroxed material (Audubon, Cooper, Muir, Austin, Carson, Cronon; poetry by Frost, Stevens, Bishop, Snyder, Booth, Wilbur, and others).