Cold Pastoral: Literature, Nature, and the Anthropocene

From visions of Arcadia to Paradise and the Golden Age, the pastoral theme has always been intertwined with a series of philosophical, aesthetic, and historical claims — about freedom, deprivation, labor, technology, human primacy, and notions of the good. Through the medium of the pastoral—variously defined as a genre, a set of rhetorical moves, or an uneasy collection of tropes—writers have evoked, described, and accounted for nature and humanity’s place within it. What use is literature as a means of envisioning, describing, delimiting, and relating to nature? And how, as occupants of the Anthropocene—an era of the world in which human activity is a determinative force across ecologies and time—are we to approach the pastoral theme today?

By considering a range of texts—from Hesiod’s Works and Days to the “cold pastoral” of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by way of selections of Virgil, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and Milton—this class will examine the pastoral mode and how it has been used. How do pastoral theories or practices intersect with accounts of aesthetic value, ethical value, or the value of the non-human? Is pastoralism necessarily an idealization of nature; or can it communicate something darker—intimations of human frailty, vanity, and finitude? Students will also read these texts for their formulations of politics, gender, sexuality, empire, and race and, under this rubric, consider various counter- or anti- pastoral responses by Vievee Francis, Joyelle McSweeney, and Annie Seaton. Critical supplements are likely to include Paul Alpers, William Empson, Donna Haraway, Frank Kermode, Karl Marx, Friedrich Schiller, Raymond Williams, and Spinoza, among others.

Course Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:30
July 11 — August 01, 2019
4 weeks

$315.00

Registration Open

Cold Pastoral: Literature, Nature, and the Anthropocene quantity

Enroll