LIT 155 CM - Writing Nature: Gardens, Fields, and Wilderness

This course will explore the various ways in which authors from biblical and classical antiquity to the present have written about nature and the natural world. We will approach this dizzyingly vast subject in two principal ways: by site, as the title indicates, and by genre. We will consider how, for example, gardens have been represented and re-imagined over time (overgrown, manicured, full of gods, full of pests), and how a literary mode like pastoral has been defined and reconceived over time (a shepherd lamenting lost love, an adolescent fleeing the city for the country). Our readings will include poems, plays, novels, and essays by Shakespeare, Milton, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Robert Frost, Jamaica Kincaid, and others.

Offered: Occasionally

Credit: 1

Course Number: LIT 155 CM