Minor Exam 1

Topic: "Nature Writing, Ecocriticism and the American Pastoral"

Committee: Robert Kern (chair), James Wallace , Andrew Bunie

Exam Date: January 24, 2000

Varieties of Nature Writing

  • de Crevecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
  • Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. (1787)
  • Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers (the massacre of the pigeons) (1823)
  • Cooper, Susan Fenimore. Rural Hours (1850)
  • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature" (1836)
  • Thoreau, Henry David. "Ktaadn." The Main Woods. (1864)
  • --. "Walking." (1851)
  • --. Walden. (1854)
  • --. A Week on Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
  • Burroughs, John. John Burroughs America. (1867-1922)
  • Muir, John. The Mountains of California (1894)
  • Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain (1903)
  • Faulkner, William. "The Bear." Go Down Moses.
  • Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. (1949)
  • Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (1962)
  • Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. (1968)
  • Momoday, Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. (1967)
  • Berry, Wendell.
  • --. "The Unforseen Wilderness." The Unforeseen Wilderness. (1971).
  • --. "The Entrance to the Woods." The Unforeseen Wilderness. (1971).
  • --. "A Few Words In Favor of Edward Abbey." What are People For?. (1990)
  • --. "Wallace Stegner and the Great Community." What are People For?. (1990)
  • Dillard, Annie Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (1974)
  • Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. (1977)
  • Erlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces. (1985)
  • Lopez, Barry. "Landscape and Narrative." Crossing Open Ground (1986)
  • --. The Rediscovery of North America. (1990)
  • Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. (1990)
  • Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.(1991)
  • Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. (1996)

Critical Texts

  • Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. (1995).
  • Branch, Michael. "Indexing American Possibilities: The Nature History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audobon." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. (1996)
  • Clarke, Joni Adamson. "Toward an Ecology of Justice: Transformative Ecological Theory and Practice. Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment. Ed. Michael Branch et al. (1998).
  • Cronan, William., ed. Uncommon ground : rethinking the human place in nature (1996).
  • Forum on Literatures of the Environment. PMLA. October (1999).
  • Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. (1999).
  • Killingsworth, M. Jimmie and Jacqueline S.
    Palmer. "Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderland: the
    frontiers of environmental justice in Latina and Native American
    writing." Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Ed. Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells (1998).
  • Lyon, Thomas. This Incomparable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (Part I: A History). (1989).
  • Marx, Leo. "The Full Thoreau" The New York Review of Books. 46:12 (July 15, 1999): 44-48.
  • --. The Machine in the Garden. (1964).
  • --. "Pastoralism in America." Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. (1986).
  • --. "American Institutions and Ecological Ideals." The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. (1970)
  • Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. (1
  • 970).
  • Murphy, Patrick. Literature, Nature and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (esp. "Voicing Another Nature," and Let the Survivors of Contact Speak: In the Canon and the Classroom). (1995).
  • --. "Otherness and Inhabitation in Recent Mulitcultural American Literature." Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells., eds. (1998).
  • Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. (1982).
  • Norwood, Vera. Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature. (1993).
  • --. "Heroines of Nature: Four Women Respond to the American Landscape." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. (1996).
  • Scheese, Don. "Pastoralism: Illustration and Definition." Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. (1996).
  • Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." (1893)

Videos

  • Rachel Carson's Silent spring. 1993
  • The West of the imagination 1989