Paper Topics

Aldo Leopold argues for the creation of a Land Ethic to preserve and conserve the environment.   Using the works of Abbey, Tempest Williams, and Kingsolver, investigate the state of the Land Ethic in the United States some 60 years after Leopold wrote his seminal essay.  In your paper, consider the following questions: What is a Land Ethic? How is it reflected in the work of these writers? How and why is a Land Ethic still relevant in our world today according to these books?

Emerson, Thoreau, and Kingsolver can be viewed as nature writers of the Eastern United States.   In contrast, we can group Bird, Abbey, and Tempest Williams as nature writers of the Western United States.  Explore the impact of geography on writing by comparing and contrasting how these writers use different (or similar) descriptive techniques to present these starkly different landscapes.

Although developed most fully by Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge, many of the writers we have read this semester have noted a relationship between nature and the body.  Select two writers we have read this semester and compare and contrast the relationship between the environment and the health (physical and/or psychological) of the body.  In particular, consider how this relationship is presented figuratively and literally.

In "To Build A Fire," Jack London describes the quality of mind of "the man" this way: "he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances." Use London's measures of "imagination," "alert in the things of life," and "significances," to analyze the perceptions of nature and the environment presented by Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and a character from Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." The relationship Newton posits between one generation of thinkers and earlier generations is as appropriate to writers as it is to scientists. The writings of earlier writers--whether in themes, style, or subject--influence the writing of subsequent generations. That influence, however, is not without change. Select one twentieth century writer we have studied and analyze how s/he "stood on the shoulders of giants" in his/her text: who were the earlier writers influencing the writer and shaping his/her work? What did the author borrow from these earlier writers? How did the author change this material to make it his/her own and unique for our twentieth/twenty-first century context.

Professor Cheryll Glotfelty, one of the founders of ecocriticism, explains: "Simply defined, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment."  In Beginning: Theory An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Professor Peter Barry elaborates that an ecocritical reading of a work of literature "Often . . . is just a matter of approaching perhaps very familiar texts with a new alertness to this dimension {the relationship between literature and the physical environment], a dimension which has perhaps always hovered above the text, but without ever receiving our full attention before"  (258).    Barry summarizes that ecocritics

Using these definitions of ecocriticism as a guideline, write your own ecocritical analysis of a work of fiction or literature with which you are already familiar.   In writing your analysis, consider what the ecocritical reading reveals or highlights about the work.   Remember, the work does not need to be overtly about nature and the environment, as has been the focus of the texts we have read this semester.

A topic of your own proposal.