Module description
The fact of a changing global climate caused by human intervention is undeniable. As is the U.S.A’s significant and continuing contribution as one of the preeminent world industrial powers to environmental alteration and ecological collapse. Indeed, the story of U.S. politics and culture is, in some respects, one of the attempt by a settler-colonial power to contend with a massive, varied, and often threatening natural world, expand across a continent and into others as a political project, extract and exploit resources for economic gain, and resist counterclaims upon ownership and alternative ways of relating to and using the material world.
This course considers how American Literature explores the relationship between various American peoples and the land from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. It ranges across genres, from philosophical writing and journalism, through the novel and poetry, to the short story and theatre, to narrate the spaces that accommodate the current U.S.A and the contingency, precarity, and fragility of human and animal life upon them. From famed urban spaces, through the plantations that perpetuated slavery, to ideas of the wilderness and the seascapes of the whaling industry, the course tracks how literary texts of the U.S. canon and countercanon manifest, and often too critique, American political projects and geographical fictions that have contributed to current environmental conditions.
Through the module we will also think about the relationship between literature and other more “official” forms of mapping, resource and capital extraction and land cultivation, considering how the construction and maintenance of powerful ideas such as “race” depend upon political construction and designations of space. In addition to these dominant forms of land relations, we will also explore alternative models for conceptualising the relationship between humans, texts, and the environment
Assessment details
1 x 3000 Word Essay