Module description
The fact of a changing global climate caused by human intervention is undeniable. As is the U.S.A’s significant and continuing contribution as one of the preeminent world industrial powers to environmental alteration and ecological collapse. Indeed, the story of U.S. politics and culture is, in some respects, one of the attempt by a settler-colonial power to contend with a massive, varied, and often threatening natural world, expand across a continent and into others as a political project, extract and exploit resources for economic gain, and resist counterclaims upon ownership and alternative ways of relating to and using the material world.
This course considers how American Literature explores the relationship between various American peoples and the land from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. It ranges across genres, from philosophical writing and journalism, through the novel and poetry, to the short story and theatre, to narrate the spaces that accommodate the current U.S.A and the contingency, precarity, and fragility of human and animal life upon them. From famed urban spaces, through the plantations that perpetuated slavery, to ideas of the wilderness and the seascapes of the whaling industry, the course tracks how literary texts of the U.S. canon and countercanon manifest, and often too critique, American political projects and geographical fictions that have contributed to current environmental conditions.
Through the module we will also think about the relationship between literature and other more “official” forms of mapping, resource and capital extraction and land cultivation, considering how the construction and maintenance of powerful ideas such as “race” depend upon political construction and designations of space. In addition to these dominant forms of land relations, we will also explore alternative models for conceptualising the relationship between humans, texts, and the environment
Assessment details
Presentation (30%) & 2500 word essay (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
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Introduce students to the relationship between American literary texts and the American landscape; as political, social, ecological, and economic space
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Build on the foundations of Introduction to American Literature to demonstrate how various forms of literary text (treatises, novels, plays, poems) help constitute an American literary tradition.
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Explore how different kinds of geographical space (seascapes, deserts, forests) generate different understandings of American literary value and understanding
Learning outcomes
On completion of this course, students should be ready to:
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Write in interdisciplinary ways about American Literature
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Access varieties of sources for position, historical relevance, and aesthetic values
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Have a nuanced knowledge of key writers and themes, as well as historical events relating to colonisation in US history and culture.
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Understand better the relationship between literary canon formation and American power relations, particularly around the concept of physical space and environment.
Teaching pattern
One hour lecture and one hour seminar
Suggested reading list
- W. Whitman – Leaves of Grass
- H. Melville – Moby Dick
- N. Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
- Octavia Butler – Parable of the Sower
- Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
- Emily Dickinson – Poems
- Mary Rowlandson – The Narrative of the Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
- Willa Cather – O! Pioneers/ My Antonia
- John Ridge – Joaquin Murietta
- Lorraine Hansberry – A Raisin in the Sun
- Eric Walrond – Tropic Death
- Gloria Anzaldua – Borderlands/La Frontera
- Jack London – To Build a Fire
- HD Thoreau – Cape Cod
- Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony