Reading & Composition

Contemporary debates about cultural matters often appeal to nature to decide them. Parties debating a cultural issue will attempt a familiar gesture: each will claim that its position is natural and therefore true. What relationship between society and nature does this appeal assume?  Why is nature seen as factually accurate or true?  Why would an appeal to nature decide a cultural issue?

Reading literary and theoretical works from different cultures and historical moments, we will identify and compare the multiplicity of “natures” that have been generated in these different contexts.  By continuation, we will explore the implications of different modes of seeing the relationship between the culture and nature: as one of opposition, continuity, ambivalence, etc.

Throughout our exploration of literature, nature, culture, you will think about the argumentative appropriation of nature in contemporary debates about gender, race, class, sexual orientation; development versus conservation; local versus global; old versus new; science versus religion; man versus animal; and individual versus collective.

In addition to focusing on the ways in which nature and culture appear in the texts, we will also examine the role of fiction in shaping our cultural values and public policies with regards to nature. Why would one choose the written word as an approach to the natural world in the first place? What can literature as fiction do that other ways of thinking about nature cannot? Most urgently, what kind of solutions or insights can literature offer to address problems and tensions in the world beyond the written page?

Throughout the semester, we will ask how reading about fictional worlds can be a means of better understanding our lived world: how do the situations and characters we encounter in the texts invite us to reflect upon our own lives, experiences, and decisions? In addition to emphasizing critical reading skills, we will hone our written and oral communication skills by striving to express our ideas and observations with ever-increasing clarity and ever-sounder argument.

Possible Reading List:

• Homer, The Odyssey
• Ovid, The Metamorphoses
• Kafka, The Metamorphosis
• Shakespeare, King Lear
• Shelley, Frankenstein
• Poetry from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Pound, Moore, Eliot, Stevens, Ginsberg.