ABSTRACT
How do we incorporate climate change into literature courses that are not explicitly focused on ecocriticism or the environment, but on literary and cultural history more broadly? And what if those courses are set not in the present but in the past? This essay describes the challenges and opportunities for integrating ideas about climate change into a “regular” late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century American literature survey course-into a course, in other words, that is not marked as “environmental.” Doing so successfully, I believe, has two important benefits: first, it can help make climate change, broadly conceived, part of our “normal” discourse of US literary history rather than a special topic to which only ecocritics pay attention; and second, it can help show students how literary history can be brought to bear on the world in which we live today, or how we might look back in order to look ahead. I base these remarks on a course I taught last spring, “American Literature:
1865-1930.” One of four American literature period survey courses offered by my department, this course is taken predominantly by English majors and is offered every other year. It typically enrolls 50-70 students and is taught in a lecture/discussion section format. Although some courses in our department are cross-listed with the Program in Environmental Studies, including “Literature and Environment” (a course I have also taught), “American Literature: 1865-1930” carries no such cross-listing and thus does not advertise itself as an “environmental” course. But this time I experimented with a new approach to the syllabus, highlighting the ways in which the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century brought Americans face to face with many of the same questions that preoccupy us today, including anthropogenic climate change. In what follows I will describe how I adjusted the syllabus, the lectures, and the course assignments to bring the ecocritical concerns of the course-and the period-into relief. My main goal in organizing the syllabus was to insert a “bright green thread”
into the readings so that it would be possible for me to highlight the engagement of turn-of-the-century American literary texts with what we have come to call, in a broad sense, climate change. I did this in two ways. First, in one unit of the course I arranged a cluster of texts that have already been marked out by ecocritics for analysis. This cluster-which I placed at the beginning of the Progressive Era unit of the course, roughly at the semester’s midpoint-included writing by Sarah Orne
Jewett (“A White Heron”), John Muir (“A Wind-storm in the Forests”), Jack London (“To Build a Fire”), and Charles Chesnutt (“The Goophered Grapevine”).1 Having these texts in the syllabus not only let me draw in my lectures on the rich variety of ecocritical interpretation they have engendered; it also permitted me to talk directly about the role of culture in the rise of new forms of environmental consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, throughout the rest of the syllabus I sprinkled texts that could be
brought productively into conversations about environmental concerns, even if those texts weren’t already identified as “ecocritical.” They might include, for example, depictions of extreme weather, environmental manipulation or degradation, or at the least a strong sense of place. I tried to make sure that these selections came from different regions of the US and that they represented a range of both “natural” and “human-made” environments (itself an artificial distinction). These texts included, for example, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (for its detailed descriptions not only of the Mississippi River but also the geographies of slavery); José Marti’s essay, “Coney Island” (for its dazzling account of the garish transformation of a “barren heap of dirt” into a floodlit seaside resort); and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (for its haunting scenes of urban detritus and damaged dreams). None of these texts, I should note, would be out of place in a traditional “American Literature: 1865-1930” course, and that is very much the point: my goal was to populate the syllabus with works that could participate, when prodded, in fruitful discussions of the literary and cultural history of global climate change. This also means that I prepared my twice-weekly lectures with an eye, where
appropriate, toward bringing this green thread to the surface. It does not mean that every lecture was organized around climate change; that would have been a very different course. But it does mean that I frequently lingered over scenes and passages that I thought might resonate particularly well with that topic. At the same time, I did not necessarily identify these moments as being “about” climate change, particularly in the weeks before we reached the Progressive Era cluster described above. Once we reached that cluster, however, I could not only bring certain striking passages from earlier in the course back into view, offering students fresh ways to consider them in light of the ecocritical foregrounding the cluster provided; I could also refer back to the thematic concerns and formal strategies of the works within the cluster as we moved ahead into the second half of the course once the green thread had become more explicit. I should note that I was simultaneously doing this-pulling on different course threads-with several other topics regarding which I wanted the students to make connections between the texts of the past and the concerns of the present, including race relations and economic disparity. I made this rationale explicit in the introductory course lecture, encouraging students to look for these threads even in texts that didn’t necessarily foreground them. Take, for example, the case of Huckleberry Finn. Appearing at the end of our unit
on Reconstruction, Twain’s text spoke most emphatically to questions of race relations, and I spent a good deal of time in one of my lectures (as have many critics)
discussing the novel’s controversial ending, particularly Jim’s farcical re-enslavement, in light of the failures of Reconstruction and its legacy for black civil rights struggles today. But I also made the point, in an earlier lecture, of highlighting this passage from chapter nine, a detailed description of “one of those regular summer storms”:
It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale under-side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest-fst! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the underside of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs-where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
