You might think that when Americans think of Nature we think of purple mountain majesties and fruited plains (“America the Beautiful”), but that has not always been the case. The Puritans, for example, were quite wary, believing that Nature was easily a threat and needed constant control. At the other end of the spectrum are contemporary concerns about climate change that predict human suffering resulting from human interference in Nature’s balancing forces. In this course we will follow the shifting American vision of nature from the Puritans through the Romantics and Realists and into the contemporary visions in climate fiction. Some of the authors we will read are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Annie Dillard.
((Joan Cucinotta - Wednesday - CMU))
