Overview of Course

What would be included in a body of literature that is ‘of the earth’? Poems, certainly: celebrations of beauty, elegies of loss. Prose also: memoirs of childhoods spent in fields or on rivers, stories of summiting or spiritual renewal, also potentially celebratory or sorrowful. Creation stories. Climate fiction. In this course, we will consider works of literature across multiple genres, letting the authors tell us what the earth is to them, including indigenous perspectives. At the same time, we will let the earth itself talk to us as we move from port to port, from delta to harbor, from peninsula to continent. We will make something of our own literature of earth from the ocean swell and vast skies. We will start with the groundwork of close reading and build up to discerning the relationship between individual point of view and cultural context. You’ll write many short, two-part reading responses based on specific words and phrases in the assigned texts followed by personal reflection. Our process of writing and discussion will lead each of you towards a focused longer work, also literary analysis combined with personal response, that articulates your own relationship to this beautiful and complex planet.