Course description

A 2009 book by John Felstiner poses a rather odd and surprising question: Can Poetry Save the Earth? In this course, we’ll explore why someone would ask this question and what assumptions about poetry, nature, and environmentalism are encoded in it. We’ll begin with a survey of recent arguments that trace origin of modern ecological thought to poetry of the Romantic period, roughly 1780-1830. On the cusp of the industrial revolution and in the midst of political turmoil and war, authors from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Mary Shelley and Jane Austen explored the idea of a more integrated and sustainable relationship between human beings and environment—a relationship conditioned by scientific and technological developments, an awareness of ecological change, and ideas about human consciousness and will. This course is designed to serve three purposes: first, to engage in sustained and detailed analysis of major authors and texts of British and American Romanticism; second, to introduce and analyze major debates and secondary sources in modern environmental studies and ecocriticism; and third, to bring these fields into conversation by reading literature through an ecocritical lens, but just as importantly, by reading current debates against and through Romantic literature.