ENGL 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

(crosslisted) AMST 4675
(ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Fall or Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

This course counts toward the Literatures of the Americas and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

G. Hutchinson.

This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness—a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured.