ENGL 394
The Nature of Nature Spring 2021
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 394 / ENVI 390
This is not the current course catalog

“Nature” is one of the commonest words in English. And yet what does it signify? Is it primarily descriptive (all living things), or normative (“natural” foods, “human nature”)? This course will consider the richly incoherent ways we think about the living world, paying attention to the difficulty of narrating processes that are often too big, too small, too quick or too slow for direct human apprehension. We’ll also explore the ways popular nature writing mingles scientific reporting with implicit judgments about human identity, morality, and social organization. Writers studied will include Elizabeth Kolbert, N. Scott Momaday and Charles Darwin. We’ll also consider the technological mediations of nature in documentaries by David Attenborough and Lynette Wallworth, among others.