As threats to our environment intensify, there is a growing interest among students across the country in the role that literature can play (and has played) in helping us develop and understand our relationship to our natural and built environments. This class will offer a brief history of literary representations of nature and of cities, and will then focus on modern (especially modern American) texts and films. Just as there is no easy social or scientific solution to problems posed by degradation of our environment, it turns out that literature offers no easy fixes. Indeed, it is in the variety and complexity of 'strategies' (occasionally contradictory) offered in literature that we can find some means of deepening an understanding of human motivations and systems of evaluating needs, means and goals for life in the next century. Texts will include, amongst others, Thoreau's Walden (selections), Ted Kerasote's Blood Ties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt, Faulkner's The Bear, and Don DeLillo's White Noise.
