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What is nature? The wilderness of the mountains and deserts? The life of animals, plants, and humans? The “primitive” world, in contrast to civilization? The justification for cultural practices that are understood as “natural” when they express normative behavior (e.g., heterosexuality)? These are some of the questions we will tackle in this seminar that will be organized around three focal points:
(1) the symbolic and economic importance of nature in discourses of the American nation, which can be traced down in early European reports of colonization, in metaphorizations of democracy, and in their materializations in US national parks, among other examples;
(2) the importance of nature in Transcendentalism, Romanticism, and later literary movements, as well as in nature poetry, painting, and more recent developments like land art or bio art;
(3) the manifold relationships between humans and nature, as they are expressed in US American culture – for instance through the gendering and “race”-ing of nature and the naturalization of genders and “races”; the order of species and the imagined contact zones between them (see Donna Harraway’s Companion Species Manifesto); through different economies that worship, exploit, or fundamentally change nature; and others.
We will look at theory from the Myth and Symbol School (H. N. Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth; L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden) and its feminist revision (A. Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters) and explore recent theories of ecocriticism and animal studies.
Authors and texts under consideration: R. W. Emerson, “Nature”; H. D. Thoreau, Walden; N. Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; W. Whitman and E. Dickinson; S. Alexie and L. M. Silko; Deliverance (dir. J. Boorman); Jurassic Park (dir. S. Spielberg); T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain; K. J. Fowler, We Were All Completely Besides Ourselves. |
