You are here

ENGL 559 A: Literature And Other Disciplines

Narrating Nature in Realism

Meeting Time: 
W 1:30pm - 4:20pm
Location: 
LOW 111
SLN: 
14674
Joint Sections: 
GERMAN 592 A
Instructor:
Jason Groves

Additional Details:

This seminar will offer an introduction to the problems of representation, narration, and description in nineteenth-century prose, particularly with respect to nature and the physical world, waste and pollution, and the everyday and the ordinary. Focusing on the novella, the genre most associated with literary realism, the course considers how realism’s strategies of containment—in which territorial borders and fences organize and enclose landscapes, where dikes and ditches organize waterways, where sexuality is sublimated, and where excessive narrative framings structure stories of violence and death—struggle to contend with rapid environmental transformations associated with industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of international capitalism. Accordingly, this seminar will advance ongoing investigations into the approach of the environmental humanities and apply it to an epoch widely regarded as the forerunner of modern environmentalism. All readings available in English; course discussions in English. Requirements: all assigned reading, class participation, reports, and a final paper.

Authors include Droste-Hühlshoff, Fontane, Gotthelf, Grillparzer, Keller, Raabe, Storm, and Stifter. Critical and theoretical readings from Adorno, Jacobsen, Jameson, Lukacs, Sebald, as well as contemporary eco-critics.
Credits: 
5.0
Status: 
Active
Last updated: 
January 10, 2018 - 10:40pm
Share