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Explication de textes : Writing American Nature

Explication de textes : De Writing American Nature

Faculté de gestion: Faculté des lettres

Responsable(s): Benjamin Pickford
Intervenant(s): -

Période de validité: 2022 -> 2022

Pas d'horaire défini.

Séminaire

Semestre de printemps
2 heures par semaine
28 heures par semestre

Langue(s) d'enseignement: anglais
Public: Oui
Crédits: 0

Objectif

To develop your ability to closely analyse literary prose through the examination of six authors' non-fictional nature writing.  

Contenu

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

Henry David Thoreau, 'Walking' (1862)

 

This course will develop your ability to closely analyse literary prose through an examination of six literary representations of American nature of the long 19th-century. Over this period, America's 'virgin territories' were settled, developed, and gradually industrialized, and American writers recorded the impact of mankind on the natural world, lamented the loss of wild habitats, and sowed the seeds of environmentalism and ecocriticism that would take root in the 20th and 21st centuries.<br ><br >In our reading and discussions, we will focus on the rhetoric and style of our six authors to help us understand the purposes of their writing. We will pay special attention to the fact that these texts are non-fiction, and develop skills that will enable you to analyse how the objectives and intent of prose non-fiction differ from prose fiction. Key themes that will guide our interrogation of American nature writing include:

- American nature vs. the American state

- The effects of American expansion on Indigenous populations

- The relation of consciousness to nature; philosophies of nature

- Flora, fauna, and the concept of a other-than-human world

- Wilderness, wildness, and the beginnings of conservationism

- The role of literature and literary techniques in demonstrating the value of the natural world to an urban audience 

 

Bibliography

All texts will be made available on the course Moodle page:

William Bartram - Selections from Travels and Other Writings (1791)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Nature" (1836)

Susan Fenimore Cooper - Selections from Rural Hours (1850)

Henry David Thoreau - "Walking" (1862)

John Muir - "Wild Wool" (1875) and selections from The Mountains of California (1894)

Mary Austin - Selections from The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Informations supplémentaires

Benjamin.pickford@unil.ch

Unicentre - CH-1015 Lausanne - Suisse
Tél. +41 21 692 11 11
Canton de Vaud
Swiss University