ARTS 302
Landscape and Language Spring 2017
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 302
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Colloquially, the word “landscape” refers to pictures or scenes of the land, from farms to forest to wilderness. But more broadly, landscape evokes the complex, dynamic, and ever-shifting relationship between “nature” and our experience of it. Landscape and Language is a seminar that considers the tools we use to represent and narrate our relationship to the natural world. Together, we will investigate how such cultural conventions as travel, perspective, nature, and ecology influence the ways we see and understand place. Drawing from discourses of literature, architecture, art history, contemporary art, and ecocriticism, our goal is to develop a deeper critical understanding of and engagement with landscape (as a collective of readers and as individual investigators). Texts for this course will include an art historical exploration of the relationship between landscape, power, and imperialism by W.J.T. Mitchell, an ethnographic investigation of nearly obsolete place names by Robert MacFarlane, poems by historical and contemporary poets like Jean Toomer, Terrance Hayes, and Lucille Clifton, and contemporary visual art by Helen Mirra and Xaviera Simmons, among others.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 25
Expected: 20
Class#: 4053
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly discussion in an online forum; two short response papers, and a final research paper or creative project (10-12 pages or equivalent) investigating a specific landscape
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: English majors
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTS 302 Division I ENGL 302 Division I

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