COMP 387
Big Game: Adventure, Empire, Ecology Fall 2018
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 347
This is not the current course catalog

“Big Game: Adventure, Empire, Ecology” asks how the era of imperial expansion and the study of “natural history” leads into our contemporary ecological crisis. We will begin with readings of influential colonial travel and adventure narratives like Robinson Crusoe, the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, sections of Darwin, and Captain Cook’s travel journals, and in-class work with archival materials like the Indian Botanical Survey and the Elphinstone Family Book. In the first weeks, we will consider how the aesthetics of adventure circulated throughout the British Empire in both the East Indies and India, and ramifies elsewhere in the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Belgian holdings. We will conclude with a suite of readings through which we will attempt to locate a productive intersection between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies, drawing together sensationalist disaster journalism with environmental activism emerging from the Global South. This course will be especially of interest to students in English, Comparative Literature, and Environmental Studies.