This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

Ecopoetry – nature poetry that is environmental and environmentalist – is an international twenty-first century movement. But in the nature poetry and poetics of the United States ecopoetry has deep and wide-spread roots. This seminar will explore this movement in U.S. nature and environmental(ist) poetry and poetics from the nineteenth into the present. We’ll read romantics and post-romantics (including Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson and Thoreau), modernists (including Frost, Stevens, Jeffers, Moore, Eliot, Sterling Brown) post-modernists (including Snyder, Merwin, Bishop, Berry) and contemporaries (including Diaz, Perez, Sze, Graham, Hass, Baker, Gander, Dungy, Hillman and Hirshfield). We will read relevant theories of nature and animals, and their representation in poetry; and we’ll also read ecopoetics, essays by poets and others about the natures and uses of ecopoetry. While our exploration will be primarily historical, our focus will also be theoretical, involving a number of recurrent topics, including anthropocentrism (and ecocentrism), anthropomorphism (personification and the pathetic fallacy), animals and things; place, disaster, and pollution; extinction, environmental justice, climate change, and climate emotions, including despair and hope. You will learn how to read a poem ecocritically. You will be asked to write three five-page essays on a poem by a post-romantic, a modern, and a post-modern poet. Alternately, you may write a five-page essay on a post-romantic or modern and a ten-page essay on a contemporary poet. I welcome students from English and from other majors. This seminar is multi-centered and open-ended. It benefits from local the experiences and expertise from its students. I learn as much as I teach.

Course reader for course readings

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills