ENG 4172: Environmental Literature (2025-2026)

View all ENG classes

From creation stories to postapocalyptic climate fiction, literary art has long been a fundamental means of understanding our relationship to the natural world. Writers in different times and places have portrayed nature as pastoral or brutal, providential or indifferent, integral to humanity or alien to it, a revelation or a raw material. This course explores questions such as how literature shapes human approaches to the environment (e.g., through movements such as romanticism, transcendentalism, naturalism, regionalism); how a literary perspective on creation compares to lenses used by other disciplines (such as theology, philosophy, science, economics, politics and law); and what wisdom and hope literature can provide in the face of today’s planetary crises. Some typical topics include wilderness, primitivism, the sublime, technological determinism, indigenous knowledge, ecocriticism, and environmental justice. Course organization may vary by instructor (chronological, geographical, thematic) but will include authors from diverse backgrounds writing in a variety of genres (such as poetry, sacred texts, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, and journalism).