Dr. Brian Deyo

In this seminar we’ll be studying literary representations of the environment. This means we’ll be examining human relations with—and attitudes toward—the nonhuman world via literary texts. We’ll engage with a diverse set of literary genres, including creative non-fiction, poetry, the essay, the short story, and the novel. To deepen our understanding of the literature we’ll be reading, we’ll engage a diverse range of theoretical and critical discourses in the environmental humanities: e.g., ecocriticism, animal/animality studies, ecofeminism, and environmental philosophy. We’ll also examine how and why representations of the natural world vary throughout history. As we’ll see, as human relations with the environment change, the environment changes as well—which in turn ought to necessitate changes in our conception of it, not to mention our understanding of our role, status, and place within it. Indeed we live in a moment whereby the combined effects of human agriculture, industry, and technology have managed to produce cataclysmic change in the earth’s physical, chemical, and biological processes—change on an order of magnitude that may be irreversible, possibly even imperiling the survival of the human species. As many of the authors we’ll be reading powerfully suggest, the natural world is, in a manner of speaking, communicating with us. Now more than ever it seems that humans need to collectively adapt to an increasingly volatile and unpredictable world. By studying literature, our goal is to become more intellectually, imaginatively, and (perhaps most important) feelingly attuned to the question of what it is (or might mean) to be human in an age of planetary crisis.

I anticipate it is likely we’ll read authors whose work has been included in American and British canons of “nature writing,” such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. However, the majority of the literature we’ll be reading will be more contemporary, including the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Jeff Vandermeer, J.M. Ledgard, Kathleen Jamie, and Ursula Le Guin.