COML 3111 - Literature, Art, and the Environment

(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Core course for Comparative Literature Majors.

K. Pinkus.

That literature and art can express concern over the environment or reflect environmental attitudes is nothing new. This course, however, will open up the possibility that literature, film, and art actively intervene in helping to confront compelling issues and to define the boundaries of what constitutes the environment (literally that which turns around us) or Nature itself. As we think about the profound links between writing and the environment; landscape and human activity; geological time and human time our guides may include authors Homer, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Thoreau, Melville; artists Poussin, Turner, Rothko and Smithson, and others. Students will write several short papers and participate in a group project, imagining an exhibit of Earth Art and Literature. This is a core course for the major so we will undertake a series of exercises to explore the following: comparisons of text and image; translation practices, comparative forms of research, curatorial theory and practice, “field work” in comparative literature.