Writing about nature and environmental issues

Lectures: 2 sessions/week, 1.5 hours/session

None

Seventeenth-century Europeans looked at the American landscape as outsiders and invested its distinctive features with symbolic meaning. In their writings they expressed deep ambivalence about its contours and its inhabitants: Was it a hostile wilderness or a newfound Eden? The habit of reading the American landscape in symbolic terms has persisted and continues to play out in twentieth and twenty-first century writings. Many of the most intense conflicts over environmental issues are expressed in, and played out against, a background of competing symbols.

In this course we will read and write about works that explore symbolic encounters in the American landscape. Some of the assigned works look at uneasy encounters between ordinary individuals and animals—wolves, eagles, sandhill cranes—that Americans have invested with symbolic significance; others explore conflicts between the pragmatic American impulse to impose order on unruly nature and the equally American inclination to enshrine the unaltered landscape.

Most of our shared readings can best be described as literary non-fiction, but all of them raise questions that lead beyond literature to history, ecology, environmental policy, and anthropology. In your essays, you will have the opportunity to pursue these questions and to respond to the insights of scholars in related fields. The assigned readings will also give us a chance to meet some crusty characters—like Edward Abbey, the park ranger who liked to see the tourists gape at the six-foot gopher snake that kept him company, and Floyd Dominy, head of the Bureau of Reclamation who believed that his dams would usher in a new golden age of agriculture in the desert Southwest. John McPhee, author of two assigned works, even orchestrated an encounter between two such characters—sworn enemies—and recorded their words as they battled over the true value of the American landscape.

The tensions evident in this and other symbolic encounters should provide thought-provoking material for the three papers assigned in this course. The papers will begin with close readings of individual works and move toward more complex intellectual tasks. A series of writing exercises will prepare the way for each of the essay assignments. These exercises will help you move from individual observations about our readings to compelling insights capable of sustaining a coherent academic essay.

Assigned readings:

Recommended resources for all students:

Additional resources on reserve at Hayden Library (Note: Hayden Library resources are available to MIT students only):

Class Participation

Both the pleasure and the power of seminar-style education depend upon regular participation. I think that you will find most of the assigned reading material engaging and much of it enlightening. I suspect that, occasionally, you will find an individual reading assignment irritating. If so, you will have the opportunity to turn that irritation into fodder for your own writing.

One word of caution: if you don’t keep up with the reading, you won’t have much to say or to write about.

In this class, as in most of MIT’s writing classes, you will have regular opportunities to give and to receive feedback from your classmates. If you take the peer review process seriously, you will almost certainly become a more effective editor of your own work. Please make every effort to be present for each of the in-class workshops.

Reading journal:

I will provide guidelines for regular journal entries on the assigned readings.

Completion of work:

For your own good and that of your fellow students, I am a stickler about paper deadlines.

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