ENGL 394
The Nature of Nature Fall 2024
Division I
Cross-listed ENVI 390

“Nature” is one of the commonest words in English. And yet what does it mean? 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 particular attention to the difficulty of narrating processes that are too big, too small, too quick, or too slow for direct human apprehension. We’ll explore the way popular nature writing mingles scientific reporting with implicit and explicit judgments about human identity, and take up the insoluble problem of our proper relation to animals. Considerable attention will be paid to the ethical dimensions of contemporary environmental consciousness and unconsciousness. Writers studied will include Elizabeth Kolbert, Descartes, William Cronon, and Charles Darwin.