ENG388/001
Literature and the Environment: Elemental Approaches
Instructor: Dr. Derrick Higginbotham
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1.30 – 2.45pm
Location: SAKAMAKI, B101
Email: deh2@hawaii.edu
Office Hours: TBD
Location: 618 KUY
Course Description:
To think ‘literature’ and the ‘environment’ together, this course will turn to the past to critically examine the present and future. Our archive will be cultural materials from roughly the 1550s to the 1650s with a focus on how these texts, visual, and auditory materials represent elements of the environment, specifically land, water, and air, all of which are key to ecological sustenance. We also will read this literature in dialogue with selected theoretical works in the field of eco-criticism/environmental studies. There are two big goals for this course: one is to examine how seemingly contemporary conversations regarding climate change, sustainability, and the future utilize ideas, metaphors, and modes of thinking that emerge in early modern English culture; and the second is to consider how early modern habits of thought might influence our own, aiding in conceptualizing alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth.
I organize the texts under the rubrics of “land,” “water,” and “air,” so we consider different elements of the ecosystem, but we also will think about how they overlap and interact. In the process, we will read a range of texts, including drama, prose, and poetry as well as some engagement with visual arts like painting and music from the past and present. We will read authors including Edmund Spencer, Ben Jonson, Hugo Grotius, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Amelia Lanyer, and Hester Pulter, among others. Moreover, we will read secondary research in eco-criticism, turning to essays by Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon, Hillary Eklund, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Lorraine Daston, Eva Horn, and Kohei Saito. As we do this literary and theatrical reading together, we will think about the socio-political contests over these elements of land, water, and air, ranging from the problem of land use for economic development, to the question of water as property, to perceptions of the air as filled with communicative spirits, an element dense with messages, some interpretable, some inscrutable. Our goal to reflect critically on the world around us via these readings, even as we gain insight into the history of environmental thinking.
This course will be face-to-face.
Tentative Book List (They will be available at the campus bookstore):
William Shakespeare. Pericles. Suzanne Gossett, ed. New York: Arden, 2004.
I will provide PDFs of all the poems and secondary readings.
Student Learning Outcomes:
In this course, students will:
- Practice reading literary texts critically and appreciate how genre and other formal features shape content
- Improve skills in close reading of texts, both literary and historical
- Strengthen their understanding of eco-critical methods
- Acquire an understanding of the literary history of the English Renaissance
- Fortify their skills in presenting their idea orally
- Gain an understanding of literature’s potential and limits as a source for cultural history
- Improve their skills in incorporating and documenting secondary scholarship when crafting an argumentative essay
Methods of Assessment:
10% Participation
15% Final Exam
20% Pollinate Assignment: a presentation on class texts
20% Gathering Assignment: a collective class dictionary we create of theoretical and literary terms born of our readings and discussion
35% Harvest Assignment: a final research paper