ENROLL

Elizabeth McKinsey

Masterpieces of the "Southern Renaissance" of the early and mid-twentieth century, in the context of American regionalism and particularly the culture of the South, the legacy of slavery and race relations, social and gender roles, and the modernist movement in literature. Authors will include Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, William Percy, and others.

Michael Kowalewski

A study of the environmental imagination in American literature. We will explore the relationship between literature and the natural sciences and examine questions of style, narrative, and representation in the light of larger social, ethical, and political concerns about the environment. Authors read will include Thoreau, Muir, Jeffers, Abbey, and Leopold. Students will write a creative Natural History essay as part of the course requirements.

George Vrtis

Environmental concerns, conflicts, and change mark the course of American history, from the distant colonial past to our own day. This course will consider the nature of these eco-cultural developments, focusing on the complicated ways that human thought and perception, culture and society, and natural processes and biota have all combined to forge Americans' changing relationship with the natural world. Topics will include Native American subsistence strategies, Euroamerican settlement, industrialization, urbanization, consumption, and the environmental movement. As we explore these issues, one of our overarching goals will be to develop an historical context for thinking deeply about contemporary environmental dilemmas.

Annette Igra

In the period after 1880, the growth of a mass consumer society recast issues of identity, gender, race, class, family, and political life. We will explore the development of consumer culture through such topics as advertising and mass media, the body and sexuality, consumerist politics in the labor movement, and the response to the Americanization of consumption abroad. We will read contemporary critics such as Thorstein Veblen, as well as historians engaged in weighing the possibilities of abundance against the growth of corporate power.