PROPOSED (NEW) COURSE:
This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the traditions of environmental literature. Students will learn to think across the humanities, arts, and sciences. May explore a particular group of writers, genre, historical period, or bioregion. May be repeated once as topics change. Prerequisite: ITW 101. Annually.
RATIONALE:
This 200-level course has been taught as an interdisciplinary course since it was added to the catalog. For example, in a team-taught version of this course in the Spring of 2007 on “Mountains and Literary Imagination” we had cultural historians and mathematitions visit the class to talk about the cultural history of specific landscapes about which students were reading poems and looking at paintings. Students also compared the representation of mountains in European and American painting with those from Asian cultures. In the Spring of 2006 the book order included both Wordsworth’s poetry and Tom Wessels’s modern classic of forest ecology Reading the Forested Landscape. This change makes this 200-level English course available as an II course in the Integrative Studies program and provides faculty with the opportunity to continue developing courses that invite interdisciplinary collaboration.