Idealistic Nature: The Literature, Philosophy, and Cognition of Ecology
Course Description:
We are dependent on our environment for survival. But what is “the environment” and what is “nature”? Humans—as well as termites and elephants—live in a world that is both given to us and shaped by their own interventions. In this course, we will explore the history that shapes our modern understanding of the natural world. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the documentary Planet Earth, representations of the world around us influence the way we understand our relationship to nature—is nature a world animated by gods and spirits? Or a delicately evolved system on the brink of destruction? The course will investigate how changing views of nature are deeply implicated in our social and ethical, as well as ecological, relationships. We will consider the debate over the start of the anthropocene—that is, when does human activity begin to substantially affect our planet?—within the context of the long intellectual history of Western conceptions of the relationship of “man” and “nature.”
This course will be organized along three major units:
Enchanted cosmos: the class will begin by exploring the deep roots of Western understandings of nature and the universe. Starting with Plato and ending with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we will read literary and philosophical works that present “pre-scientific” representations of nature. Along the way, we will explore how developments in the visual arts helped to shape how people oriented themselves in the natural world.
Humans, nature, and the new sciences: breaking with earlier accounts of the cosmos, the scientific discoveries of the 16th to 18th centuries accompanied a whole new way of thinking about man’s place in nature. In this unit, we will trace how new notions of human self-mastery developed hand-in-hand with a new mechanistic understanding of nature and “the universe.”
Pristine nature: in this final unit, we will consider how modern understandings of the environment arose in response to the over-exploitation of our natural resources. We will investigate how the separation of “mankind” from the natural world ushered a new exploitative view of human labor as well as of natural resources. Focusing on the representations of nature from the Romantic period to the creation of the U.S. National Parks to the astonishing popularity of nature documentaries such as Planet Earth, we will ask how we developed conceptions of “untouched” nature—separate from and yet endangered by human activity.
Term project for this course will take the form of a group project using StoryMap JS. During the last month of the term, we will bring our readings together and work towards building a mapping project that rethinks the boundaries of a threatened ecological area in terms of competing histories, narratives, and cultural claims.