ENST 253 - Topics in American Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).

Topic for 2018/19a: American Environmentalism: Literature & Ecology. ENGL 253 ) This course examines the development of environmental literature, from the classic “nature writing” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the emergence of contemporary ecological texts and various theories of ecocriticism. Readings draw from multiple disciplines and feature a wide range of writers, such as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Leslie Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben and others. Some local field trips included. Paul Kane.

Two 75-minute periods.