Posting on course blog:
http://blogs.uoregon.edu/environmentalliterature230/
• Problems accessing blog?
• Syllabus – changed blog post #1 due date
• What to write about?
• How to post?: videos, photos, links, categories, tags, page
breaks
• Rachel Carson Center Blog
• Questions?
Literature and
Environment
Key terms and foundational narratives
Checklist of characteristics of
environmental texts
• The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a
framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that
human history is implicated in natural history.
• The human interest is not understood to be the only
legitimate interest.
• Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s
ethical orientation.
Checklist of characteristics of
environmental texts
• Some sense of the environment as a process rather than a
constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.
Environmental
(1995)
--Buell, The
Imagination
How do we read a text for the environment?
Stories, metaphors, images … have come to seem
deceptively transparent through long usage.
If we pay attention we can read in any text and see these
stories, metaphors, images at work.
Major environmental modes/ motifs
• Pastoral
• Georgic
• Picturesque
• Sublime
• Wilderness
• Ecological tropes
‘The pervasiveness of these phenomena warrant our thinking of
them as “master metaphors,” of centuries-long, sometimes
millennia-long persistence. We cannot even begin to talk or
even think about the nature of nature without resorting to
them.’
--Buell, The Environmental Imagination
Pastoral
• An idealized
non-urban
space where
humans are
free from labor
and live more
closely in tune
with the
environment
and each
other. There
are often
shepherds.
Georgic
• Also presents
an idealized
country space,
but this one
features
agriculture
rather than
shepherding
and leisure:
there is labor
present.
Wilderness
• Vision of
nature as a
scary, dark
place full of
potentially evil
forces.
Civilization is
good;
wilderness is
bad. In later
years, this
dichotomy
reverses:
wilderness is
the source of
goodness while
civilization is
the source of
evil.
Sublime
• Landscapes that
are both inspiring
and terrifying –
that give a great
sense of aweinspiring
magnificence
compared with a
feeling of
insignificance or
despair. Wild
landscapes that
can crush you but
are so beautiful
you don’t mind!
Picturesque
• A state between the
sublime and
beautiful , not
controlled by
humans but not
totally wild.
Sometimes seen as
the culmination of
the older pastoral
tradition, it finds
aesthetic beauty in
nature.
• More generally: a
way of seeing; seeing
the environment as
landscape, as
scenery; an
aestheticization of
environment.
Ecological tropes
• “Web,” “Machine,”
“System,” “Chain,”
“Scale of Being,”
“Ladder,”
“Organism,”
“Mother,” (term
ecology originally
from Greek—oikos,
meaning
“household”)
• Cross disciplinary
• Sometimes, various
modes/motifs can
operate at once; for
instance, a text
could depict a
landscape as both
both sublime and
foreboding, or as
both pastoral and
wild, depending on
the point of view.
Anthropocentric/Ecocentric
• Not a binary, but a continuum.
• Where does a given text (or philosophy) place
its value?
• Manifestation in language?
• Stylistic or formal features of the text.
Quiz
Genesis
• There is historical evidence that Genesis actually contains
TWO different creation stories, written in two different time
periods and cultures. The “Priestly” (P) version goes from
1:1 to 2:3, and the “Yahwist” (J) version goes from 2:4 to
2:25. The second version is actually much older than the
first, dating from the 6th or 7th century B.C.
• Important to identify internal rifts, gaps, inconsistencies in
texts.
• What are some key differences between the two Genesis
stories of creation?
• What do these accounts imply about the human relationship
to the more-than-human world?
Genesis
vs.
Pima
• Written text
• Oral tradition
• Universal/garden
• Specific topography,
local knowledge of
watershed, bioregion
• God/man/creatures
• Persons/creatures
• Centrality of man to
narrative
• Centrality of other
creatures to narrative
• “Dominion”
• “Make it useful”
Historical Overview:
Environmental Attitudes
• Ancient Greece: pastoral, georgic
• 17th century: rise of the pastoral in Europe
• 18th century: picturesque; Enlightenment (scientific, ordered,
taxonomical views of nature)
• 17th/18th centuries in the Americas: Native American attitudes
towards the wild as spiritual place and source of resources
vying with Puritan fear of wilderness as evil (and also as a
source of resources).
Historical Attitudes, continued
• Late 18th, early 19th century: In Europe, Romantic visions of nature
build on picturesque and the sublime – celebration of wild beauty
and creation of the noble savage image. In America, pastoral/georgic
celebration of agriculture and farming.
• 19th C: American wilderness tradition growing – early, the
Transcendental movement sees nature and the wild as source of
potential truth; Accelerated westward expansion—creation of the
“mythic West.” Frontier “closes” in final decade of the century.
• 20th C: Policies to protect and preserve wild spaces. Nature as
restorative and character forming (“strenuous life” philosophy).
Nature as recreation and the celebration of American wilderness as
defining national identity.
For Thursday
Reading:
• Review Rowlandson and Crevecoeur
• Emerson, “Nature” (note: the pdf isn’t the full essay, though
you can find the full essay online:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/natur
e-contents.html
Reading questions:
• See next slide
Assignments:
• First blog post due by Wednesday evening, October 3, at 8 pm.
For Thursday
Reading questions:
• At the time Emerson was writing, there really was no such thing as
“American literature.” U.S. writers were assumed to be less
sophisticated and important. How could Emerson’s essay, Nature,
be seen as a manifesto rejecting the European tradition and
standing up for American art and philosophy?
• In Chapter I, “Nature” (28-30), what is the poet’s unique
relationship with the landscape?
• In his conclusion Emerson says, “Empirical science is apt to cloud
the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to
bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole” (51).
What is he saying here? Do you agree with him? What is Emerson’s
overall relation to science in this essay?
• Emerson was trained as a minister, but then broke with the church
and embraced philosophy. How is this essay influenced by a
Christian tradition, but how does it also depart from what we would
typically consider Christian thought? (look especially at the last few
pages)