From: Tynes, Sheryl On Behalf Of Academic Affairs
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 9:09 AM
To: Trinity Students
Cc: Rodriguez, Alfred; Sullivan, Heather; Hazleton, Gregory
Subject: New Course Offering--open to all and a GREAT teacher!

New Course Offering!

Literature and the Environment:

Environmental Writing at the End of Nature (GNED 3391-1)

MW 2:30-3:45

Dr. Greg Hazleton                      

Trinity’s new Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Humanities

Sign up NOW on Tiger Paws!

*An interdisciplinary course appropriate for students at any level and with any academic focus

*No prerequisites are required

*Counts towards the “literature” requirement for the common curriculum

*Counts towards the minor in Environmental Studies

*A “Green Leaf Course” 

Course Description:

Twenty years ago the American nature writer William McKibben boldly declared “the end of nature,” suggesting that humans have so altered their environments that nature – as a place and an idea – was rapidly disappearing.  We shall take McKibben’s central concern as our own by studying how nature writers have tried to keep the natural world alive by transcribing it on the page and projecting it on the big screen.  Our investigation will be grounded in a broad survey of nature writers from Darwin and Thoreau to Gary Snyder and Annie Dillard, so you may expect a general introduction to some of the most important practitioners of the form.  Our larger goals, however, will center on the questions emerging from the ways contemporary writers and filmmakers transform the structures and themes of nature writing classics.  What does it mean to write environmentally in the 21^st century?  How do the sciences inform the fiction and poetry of contemporary writers interested in nature?  Where does science fiction fit into the world of nature writing, and what might its dystopian strain say about the state of nature?  How has Hollywood drawn upon nature writing practices for big budget films? We shall approach these questions as critics, but you will also have the opportunity to try your hand at various kinds of nature writing, thereby challenging the strict separation of critical writing from creative experimentation.    

The texts:

Books: Atwood, Margaret.  Oryx and Crake; Carson, Rachel.  Silent Spring; Dillard, Annie.  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek;  McKibben, William.  The End of Nature; Powers, Richard. Gain; Snyder, Gary. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems; Thoreau, Henry D. Excursions.

Films: Brazil; Into the Wild