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SRJC English Department's Literature Offerings:
Spring 2010 Literature Index:
Literature & Environment
ENGLISH 10
Terry Mulcaire
Tues
6-9 PM
1614 Emeritus Hall
Santa Rosa Campus
“We are dependent, for understanding, and for consolation and hope, upon what we learn of ourselves from songs and stories.” Wendell Berry
We’ll start this course by considering an idea: that the environment isn't just the place we live in, that instead it is always colored, shaped-warped, perhaps-by our imagination, be it consciously, unconsciously, or in between, in dreams, or in songs and stories. The kind of writing that we call literature, it follows, represents a particularly artful and public form of this shaping imagination. In this course, then, we'll be doing more than studying great writing about nature, the wilderness, and ecology. As we read the work of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and others, we’ll also be thinking about how the reading and writing of literature themselves may be understood as essentially “environmentalist” pursuits, part of the weaving of the world. What this suggests, in turn, is that our enjoyment and appreciation of the literature we read leads us directly into social, political, scientific, and economic engagements with environmental issues.
3 units/3 hours lecture.
CR/NC option.
Prerequisite: Completion of ENGL 100B or higher (V8); OR completion of ENGL 100; OR completion of ESL 100.
Introduction to literature, with an emphasis on American environmental literature. Study will include major figures, themes, and historical periods; different cultural perspectives on the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world; the role women have played in the development of the genre; and the relationship between environmental literature and emerging environmental concerns.
(CSU/UC) AA/AS areas H, E; CSU area C2; IGETC area 3B
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