Nature in Literature: Learning Outcomes

These are the explicit learning outcomes for this course.

Learning outcome 1

Students will demonstrate knowledge of, or experience in, literary traditions and expressions.

Competencies (outcome 1)

• Students will study literary texts and participate in the creation of critical essays as a means of exploring human experience and understanding the creative process.

  Readings will include poems and prose representing “nature” across various periods and cultural contexts. Student writings may include short essays, research papers, and journals or Weblogs.

• Students will acquire the critical and technical vocabulary enabling them to describe and analyze, and formulate an argument about, literary productions.

  This competency will be achieved both at the level of verbal meaning — diction, figurative language, allusion, tone, etc. — and in relation to wider cultural and historical contexts — industrialization, agricultural enclosures, and urbanization in nineteenth-century England, for example, or the development of the twentieth-century American conservation and ecology movements.

• This course will help students learn to assess how formal qualities of literary productions determine the nature of the experience offered and affect the response of the audience.

  For example, formal qualities of a Romantic ode by Keats — and their effects on the response of the reader — will be examined: imagery appealing to the senses and personification of the season, all contributing to a suasive acceptance of mortality.

• Students will examine multiple interpretive possibilities of a literary work, and learn that such interpretations both reflect the culture that produced them and change over time.

  For example, the illustrated poetry of William Blake will be examined in shifting contexts — as the jottings of a madman (in his lifetime), to their achieving canonical status (in the mid 20th century), to their renewed importance due to digital reproduction (in the 1990s, with the Blake Archive).

• This course will assess the relationships of works of literature to the cultural-historical nexus that produced and used them.

  For example, Gary Snyder’s poems about the American backwoods will be read as late Romantic lyrics, products of the Beatnik movement, and foundational documents in the Deep Ecology movement.

Learning outcome 2

Demonstrate effective critical thinking skills and dispositions.

Competencies (outcome 2)

• Students will be able to analyze relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express beliefs, judgments, experience, reasons, information, or opinions.

  The historical literary texts on a shared theme — the meanings of nature — offer ample opportunities for this.

• Students will learn to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of varying points of view.

  For example, nature as divine order, nature as an ideological construct, nature as a Romantic expression of loss in the industrial age. Students will have to compare and weigh diverse cross-cultural representations of a single “theme” often taken to be a universal (“nature”).

• Students will learn to generate new ideas, hypotheses, opinions, theories, questions, and proposals; and develop strategies for seeking and synthesizing information to support an argument, make a decision, or resolve a problem.

  In their critical writings and analyses of texts they will propose a thesis, entertain opposing views, and support theirs with evidence, including critical readings of the texts in question.

Learning outcome 3

Promote economic, environmental, political and social justice.

Competencies (outcome 3)

• Students will demonstrate an understanding of diverse fields of intellectual thought regarding ideal and actual societies and the goals, values, virtues, and conceptions of justice.

  For example, history of ideas, philosophy of language, historicism, fiction all bear upon literary representations of “nature,” from utopian poems (pastoral) to dystopian fiction (Frankenstein).

• Analyze and appraise the functions and impacts of specific social practices, organizations, and policies established in the name of social and environmental justice.

  Coursework addresses the question, as represented in literary texts, of how social class, political system, and economic structure affect the relation of particular human beings and groups to the environment and ecological systems (environmental justice).

• Recognize the challenges and opportunities offered by scientific, technological, and industrial developments, as well as population trends, and their implications for us as engaged national and global citizens.

  For example, Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” in early nineteenth-century London mark one response to industrial developments, as do John Clare’s poems against agricultural enclosure and the original Luddite uprisings. As we read these texts today, our own shifting contexts of environmental justice necessarily affect our interpretations.