This writing-focused 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 literary course in which the skills of textual analysis and critical writing are central, 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. The seminar will develop students’ ability to read closely and communicate their analysis effectively.

We might say that the essay, the literary and philosophical form of nonfiction writing characterized by playfulness and curiosity, wonder and digression, criticality and irony, and the *nature* essay have always been one and the same. The “relationship of nature and culture is [the essay’s] true theme,” writes a foremost theorist of the form, Theodor W. Adorno. Some of the earliest modern essayists were natural philosophers; some of our contemporary critics have suggested that the genre best suited for representing climate change and environmental devastation is the essay. This class will ask why. What is the relationship between nature and the essay? How does the essay encourage us, or allow us, to notice the planet? How does the essay track and shape our attention to the overlooked, the taken-for-granted, the world of microbes and bugs and porcupines and sea cucumbers? If nature writing falls into cliché, what does it risk obscuring? Henry David Thoreau saw the nature essay as a way to register what we stand to lose; Camille T. Dungy sees it as a way to enshrine what we value; the film essayists Chris Marker and John Akomfrah turn to the nature essay as a means to interrogate the complex and fraught connections between us. We will explore the global history of the nature essay, from classical Greece to 10th-century Japan, from 16th-century Tenochtitlan to 20th-century France, and from the 21st-century US to the outer rim of the solar system to form our own theories about how the nature essay works and what modes of attention, care, and action it might encourage. You will also practice writing nature essays in this seminar; you’ll cultivate the mode of attention the form demands, the sustained questioning it rewards.

LECTURE 003 has some seats reserved for L&S First-Year Pathways students; any remaining seats will be released before the adjustment period begins.

Requisites

• Students with 1-6 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills