Randall Roorda
University of Kentucky
Course Syllabus
Masaryk University
September 2014
American Nature Writing
Description:
This course offers an overview and sampler of a nonfiction genre peripheral to conventional
literary history but central to American sensibilities and self-regard as “Nature’s Nation.”
Grounded in nature observation yet distinct from natural history, voiced in first person yet
subordinating personal history, nature writing arises at junctures of science and memoir, where
Linnaeus and St. Augustine collide. The course will take up several moments in nature writing’s
unfolding: Thoreau (the genre’s progenitor) and Transcendentalists; the turn-of-the-century Cult
of Nature; and postwar expressions of modern environmentalism. It will conclude with recent
morphings of the genre in light of the postmodern and so-called posthuman.
Assignments and Grading:
Readings will consist of short to mid-length essays, several per class, as per the course schedule
below. Written responses to reading will be due for each session, at least a half page (singlespaced)
in length. As a rule, responses will address prompts assigned in advance, though you’ll
be welcome to pursue any line of observation that compels you. Responses will be evaluated by
a system of checkmarks—a check for satisfactory completion, with a plus-sign appended for
exceptional efforts and a minus-sign for perfunctory work—from which a letter grade will be
derived at course’s end. Since class sessions will often take points of departure from these
responses, it’s required that they be brought to class on time.
It’s also required that you have your copies of assigned texts ready to be worked with in class,
whether by printing PDFs out and marking the copies or by electronically annotating and/or
taking side notes on texts you view on a screen. I reserve the option of spot-checking to see that
you’ve prepared to work with texts in some manner, and of deducting the equivalent of one
reading response from your grade if you have not.
A brief essay of synthesis and response, four to seven double-spaced pages in length, will be due
a week after class sessions are done, on Friday 19 September. You’ll submit the essay via email,
as an attachment, to this email address: randall.roorda@gmail.com I’ll provide suggestions for
essay topics, but you’ll be free to adopt whatever topic you come up with, perhaps extending
something you embarked on in a reading response.
The course grade will be calculated thus: 50% for reading responses; 40% for the essay; 10% for
class participation, my evaluation of how actively and helpfully you work with others and
contribute to discussions in class. There will be no exams.
Course Outline and Readings:
Day 1, AM session: Intros and Issues
Thomas Lyon, “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing” and “The American Setting”
David Rains Wallace, “The Nature of Nature Writing”
Joyce Carol Oates, “Against Nature”
Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative”
Day 1, PM session: Precursors
William Bartram, from Travels
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature (plus journal entries)
Susan Fenimore Cooper, from Rural Hours
Day 2, AM session: Touchstone
Henry David Thoreau, chapters from Walden
Day 2, PM session: The Two Johns
John Muir, two essays from The Mountains of California
John Burroughs, “Wild Life About My Cabin” and “The Still Small Voice”
Day 3, AM session: The Cult of Nature (Fakers)
Essays on corvids by Ernest Thompson Seton and William J. Long
Mary Austin, two essays from The Land of Little Rain
Day 3, PM session: Mid-Century Tempers
Henry Beston, from The Outermost House
Donald Culross Peattie, from An Almanac for Moderns
Loren Eiseley, “The Judgment of the Birds”
Day 4, AM session: Environmental Apotheosis
Rachel Carson, from The Sea Around Us; from Silent Spring
Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac
Day 4, PM session: Canon-Making
Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire
Annie Dillard, “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” “Living Like Weasels,” “Sojourner”
Day 5, AM session: Revisionings
Robert Sullivan, from Meadowlands
Charles Seibert, “An Elephant Crackup?”
Amy Leach, from Things That Are
Day 5, PM session: Into the Woods
Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods”
Class convenes at Wilson Woods (weather more or less permitting)