Literary and Cultural Theory: Ecological Poetics of the 19th C. Americas

This course explores how 19th century (mostly) American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life, and how attentiveness to the ecological fashioned their ethics. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Changing their understanding of what the natural is, they proposed a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common to all creatures and in fact to all phenomena, and that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized.