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FYS 8: The Imagined Landscape
2000 Amherst College Course Catalogue description

 

Most Americans believe that our world faces "an ecological crisis" – that the "natural environment" is threatened as never before by encroachments from human technology.  But what assumptions lie behind these perceptions?  What images of the land and of human culture underpin the familiar rhetoric of environmentalism?

This course attempts to make students more self-conscious about their own views of the environments they inhabit. We study first how a variety of people in the past have defined their connections to the natural landscape and then consider some current perspectives in light of what we have learned.  To what extent are human being regarded as "part and parcel" of nature?  To what extent are people distanced from the natural landscape? Is nature seen as nurturing or threatening, balanced or chaotic?  How are we, as individuals, to reconcile – or to live with – the many contradictory perspectives that we encounter from other people and within ourselves?

Though our readings change each year, our central proposition remains consistent:  that the human imagination plays a central – and often misunderstood – role in how we view the world around us and that altering our relationship to nature ("solving the ecological crisis") is as much an imaginative act as it is a matter of social policy, political program, or technological adjustment.

We read a mixture of literary, historical, and ecological texts, and also look at photographs, paintings, and a couple of films.  Many of our examples come from New England  (e.g. William Bradford and Henry Thoreau) and the American West (John Muir and Terry Tempest Williams).  This year, we will add a particular focus on the role of the humanities in helping us understand attitudes towards nature.  What contributions can literature and the arts make to the environmental debate, usually dominated by voices from politics and science?  With this in mind, our readings will include Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Students will write several short essays, keep journals, and produce one long final paper.


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Last revision: October 30, 2000