Seminar in Reading and Interpretation (300-0-21)
Topic
Representing the Nonhuman
Instructors
Laurie Shannon
847 4913643
University Hall Room 214
Meeting Info
Locy Hall 303: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
How do we "capture" nonhuman phenomena within literary forms and genres that are designed (mainly) by humans? As an introduction to critical methods in textual studies, our seminar will think about how representation works across species and how it can grasp the relationship between animate creatures and their elemental surroundings. These habitats will range from literal fields, forests, skies, and oceans to the wily conceptual terrain of "Nature" itself. By focusing on human representations of animals and the nonhuman more broadly, this seminar delves into the question of how literary re-presentations of the natural world work - this is both a practical and a philosophical question. To address it, we'll analyze the raw materials and core resources of the written word: close observation and description; perspective, point-of-view, and matters of voice; anthropomorphizing and/or animalizing imagery; and the mind-bendingly disparate frameworks of narrative, human, evolutionary, and planetary time. In return, our readings will also trouble assumptions about how exclusively "human" we humans ever really are when we write.
Our syllabus will include classics of nature writing and environmental literature, even as we push the boundaries of what is "literary" in the first place. With various contextualizing materials (from Aesop's fables to poetry to legal verdicts) provided by the instructor, our main texts will be selected from the following major works: Shakespeare's As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream; Michel de Montaigne's Essays; sections of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man; Henry David Thoreau's "Walking" and "Wild Apples"; Octavia Hill's "Open Spaces"; Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography; Rachel Carson's "The Road of the Hawks" and Under the Sea-Wind; J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip; Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble; Derek Jarman's Modern Nature; Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus; and Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area