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“What is Nature?”
In this class students will engage with a wide variety of texts in order to see how “nature” has been constructed in Anglophone literatures and cultures. We will look at the meanings and uses of “nature,” ranging from 19th-century texts to films from the last decade, and investigate how the environment has often been used to represent abstract ideas. Such notions have changed with time, and “nature” was used to justify colonial regimes and racism or to promote artist’s ideas of widely varying lifestyles. It was, and is, a part of apocalyptic warnings that mean to convey a moral message. Yet the class will also raise the question of whether there is such a thing as “nature” itself, and how much of it is social construction put to the uses and understandings described above.
A reader with short texts and excerpts will be provided online at the beginning of the semester. Students will have to obtain Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide." |
