Training in writing expository prose. Instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

In his biblically oriented geological treatise, Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), the seventeenth-century theologian Thomas Burnet describes apocalyptic changes to the earth’s surface in terms of “revolution”: “the rise and fall... not of a monarchy or an empire, of the Grecian or Roman state, but of an entire world.” In the decades following, a tradition of primarily didactic poetry interrogates Burnet’s anxieties about the world’s end, mobilizing a variety of poetic and rhetorical techniques to negotiate the aesthetic, political, and eschatological implications of such “turns.” Examining poems by James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, and others, this course will consider several crucial questions: how do “revolutions” in the earth’s surface reflect ruptures in the social, agricultural, or natural economies? How might “seasonal form” (Dimick) or other poetic techniques mediate such change? Do these upheavals—particularly in the political sphere—signal decline, utopia, or something else entirely? What might this mean for our own era of impending climate collapse? While poetry will constitute the primary object of our investigation, we will engage these poems in dialogue with philosophical texts, including ones by Locke, Kant, Burke, and Marx and Engels, as well as scientific ones, by Buffon, Cuvier, Hutton, and others. Because this is a writing intensive course, students should plan to draft and revise their work in advance of assignment due dates. Writing assignments will culminate in a research-oriented final paper, which draws several texts into conversation with one another and offers a debatable argument.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills