Reading & Composition

“Landscapes are culture before they are nature…” Simon Schama

If landscapes are culture before they are nature, can the same be said of “nature” as a category unto itself? This course will approach "nature" and "landscape" as culturally determined and persistently unstable categories that may nonetheless guide our shared examinations of literature, photography and film. We will begin the course by interrogating territorially based practices of colonial, imperial and capitalist violence in relation to a poetics of space, probing, for instance, the “sublime” vistas of the Romantic lyric as symptomatic of a ballooning British imperialism, and the role of landscape photography in myth-making about mid century Iraq and the American frontier both. With “melancholy” as one of many possible theoretical paradigms, we will look to texts that register in their very mood the territorially specific losses wrought by modernity’s abiding pall over the world. How did poets lyricize England’s devastating Enclosure acts? What do land-based documentary practices have to say about militarism as ecoterror? What are the disappearing worlds we bare witness to in photographs that feign their preservation? As a class, we will locate the tension between corporate commodification of the land and the aestheticizing impulse to explore how texts, visual and literary, relate the loss of nonhuman entities and entities outwardly denied the status of human both. At some point, we will refract texts through the fullness of the “queer” as a historical and etymological category, looking to its originary meanings in the “strange” to inspire examinations of the bodies and spaces queered by their geographical or temporal locations, their contested perimeters, or their fictional import.

In order to broach these rich fictional and theoretical questions, this course will involve close reading texts from different generic and disciplinary angles, with particular attention to the illicit fictional worlds sprung forth by the novel and to the precarious realisms of the documentary format. Rather than offering readymade answers, our work as a class will be to practice literary analysis so as to fathom how texts produce meaning in and of themselves. As evolving writers, you will be encouraged to make close observations of style and form in order to formulate original and nuanced arguments. We will tackle the challenges of writing incrementally, beginning with the texts themselves and moving through multiple drafts in order to craft compelling literary analysis. 

Possible texts may include: 

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Albert Cossery, Laziness in the Fertile Valley

Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia”

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies”

Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature”

William Wordsworth, The Matthew Poems 

Omar Amiralay, Essay on the Euphrates Dam 

Alan Sekula, The Forgotten Space