American Writers and Writing

American Writers and Writing:

The Tradition of American Nature Writing

Dale Larson
Grays Harbor College

The Course

English 266, American Writers and Writing, is offered each spring as an undergraduate seminar in the tradition of American nature writing. Focusing on the modern, post-romantic work of naturalists in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, it examines the literary work of "natural description." Philosophically, it examines the encounter of subjects and objects as mediated grammatically, so to speak, by the verbal acts of reading and writing. In the broadest sense, it interrogates our relationship to nature through literacy - subject to the curious authority (literary and scientific at once) of printed words. Through them we ask with Emerson: Do "the ancient precept, 'Know Thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study Nature,' become at last one maxim"?

Readings / Viewings / Trekkings

Our seven texts from Thoreau's Walden to Robert Pyle's Wintergreen - including Melville's Moby-Dick, Aldo Leopold's Sand-County Almanac, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community - will center our attention. We will read and discuss them collectively. I will add supplemental handouts including works by Immanuel Kant and Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir and Joseph Sax, Daniel Boorstin and Jean Baudrillard, Lewis Thomas and Rachel Carson, among others. In addition, we will watch three special videos: "A Matter of Fact" from James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, the award-winning film Koyaanisqatsi, and the documentary Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven narrated by Robert Redford. Finally, we will take a couple of local field trips, one to Bowerman Basin during the spring shorebird migration and another through GHC's Model Watershed Project.

Writings

Each of you is responsible for three essays. They are to be done in the order assigned but submitted on separate Tuesdays of your choice, one before W-Day.

#1 - An essay in the tradition of subjective literary naturalism: do yourself what you see our main authors doing.
#2 - An appreciative analytical essay on the work of one of them.
#3 - An appreciative analytical essay on the tradition of American nature writing, one touching on the work of at least three authors studied.

Each essay should be typed, double-spaced, one side of the page, with appropriate citations as needed. Each should be four to five pages in length, exclusive of notes and addenda. We will discuss possibilities for these essays as we go.

Final Exam / Grades

The final will take the form of a last classroom discussion, one focused on the question I have printed below. It will offer a more formal but I trust not frightening occasion to evaluate the quality of your work. Grades will reflect your writing and discussion skills both.

Conferences

You can see me during my two-o'clock office hour or by appointment. I'll always be glad to talk. On the way, check out the links at the Library of Congress or ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment.

Final Examination

Note: We will gather as scheduled for our quarter final. I have thought in the interest of long-term study to publish our question here. It is meant as much to focus preview as review in English 266. Our final will take the form of a last classroom discussion, one addressing our texts and our class alike. Ideally, it will be like the class itself, "open book and open mind." Specifically, it will address, in manifold senses of the term, the practical, theoretical, and aesthetic "nature" of description.

Question: In 1981 Yale French Studies entitled its sixty-first issue, "Toward A Theory of Description." Editor Jeffrey Kittay opened his volume with a paragraph that, with a phrase changed, can shift our focus from his text to our class.

We still operate very much within the Aristotelian concept of action, which suggests that description be viewed as secondary, and purely functional, or merely decorative. Consequently, description is seen as something which must be kept in its place, functioning to fill in or to set up, and having a certain marginality or accidence, making it detachable or skippable; otherwise, if it does claim a larger droit de cite [right of a citizen] (as in descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century), it is seen to be uncontrolled or excessive or boring. [English 266] discusses the qualities, tendencies and resistances of description, what our attitudes are toward it, what elicits it, how it works, what it satisfies and leaves wanting, and the strange kind of relationships it establishes with such concepts as space and time and action, perception and cognition, writing and meaning.

With Kittay's paragraph as an outline of discussible topics, come ready to talk out the practical, theoretical, and aesthetic implications of our class as a course in the "nature" of description.