Nature and Landscape

Nature and Landscape (Fall 2008)

Convened by Matthew Ocheltree.

A. Literary Criticism

1. Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History(Cambridge, 2004)

  • Recommended reading: (a) Introduction: "Georgic Modernity: Sensory Media and the Affect of History" (pp.1-16); (b) Chapter 2: "The Microscopic Eye and the Noise of History in Thomson's The Seasons" (pp.38-66)
  • Supplementary reading: (a) Chapter 3: "Cowper's Georgic of the News: The 'Loophole' in the Retreat" (pp.67-105)
  • Critical formations and topics: genre and mode, tradition, sensibility and affect, historicism, public sphere

2. Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology(Cornell, 2004)

  • Recommended Reading: (a) Introduction: "Aesthetic Materialism and the Culture of Landscape" (pp.1-29); (b) Chapter 1: "A Genealogy of the 'Huge Stone' in Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence'" (pp.30-53); (c) Chapter 4: "The Rock Record, Mineral Wealth, and the Substance of History" (pp.161-90)
  • Supplementary Reading: (a) Chapter 3: "Blake, Geology , and Primordial Substance" (pp.94-137)
  • Critical formations and topics: history of science, geology, aesthetics

3. Penny Fielding, Scotland the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760-1830 (forthcoming, Cambridge, 2008)

  • Recommended reading: Chapter 1: "North Britain" (pp.13-39)
  • Supplementary reading: Chapter 3: "Great North Roads: The geometies of the nation" (pp.71-100)
  • Critical formations and topics: geography studies, culture and nationalism, Celticism

B. Intellectual History and Theory

4. Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, 2007)

  • Recommended reading: (a) Introduction: "The Enlightenment: Questions of Geography" (pp.1-24); (b) Chapter 3: "Above and Beyond the Nation: Cosmopolitan Networks" (pp.42-57); (c) Chapter 5: "Exploring, Traveling, Mapping" (pp.87-111); (d) Chapter 6: "Geography and the Book" (pp.167-87)
  • Supplementary reading: (a) Chapter 6: "Encountering the Physical World" (pp.112-35); (b) Chapter 9: "Geography in Practice" (pp.193-212)
  • Critical formations and topics: geography studies, book history, cosmopolitanism

5. Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment(California, 2005)

  • Recommended reading: (a) Introduction (pp.1-16); (b) Chapter 5: "From Enlightenment Vitalism to Romantic Naturphilosophie" (pp.199-236)
  • Supplementary reading: (a) Chapter 4: "The Metamorphoses of Change" (pp.159-98)
  • Critical formations and topics: history of science, biology, organicism and vitalism

6. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007)

  • Recommended reading:(a) Introduction: "Toward a Theory of Ecological Criticism" (pp.1-28); (b) Chapter 2: "Romanticism and the Environmental Subject" (pp.79-139)
  • Supplementary reading:(a) Chapter 1: "The Art of Environmental Language" (pp.29-78)
  • Critical formations and topics: ecocriticism