ABSTRACT
Carbon dioxide makes a very late appearance in “Literature Humanities,” Columbia University’s “Great Books” course. Emerging in the final section of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, one of the final texts in the year-long course, the greenhouse gas appears as part of a “great scroll of smoke” from a steamer, “curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh” (Woolf 182). Two chapters later, this smoke from the fossil fuel powered steamer is granted a capacity to persist that is denied humans and the steamer itself. As the boats and characters that Lily Briscoe is watching from the shore disappear into the horizon, the “great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction” (Woolf 1188). It is tempting to read this mournful valediction as an elegy for the epic values that Great Books courses explore: in the Age of the Anthropocene, epic heroes have vanished from view while pollution lingers in the air. However, though carbon dioxide makes an attractive surprise villain (in the end, humanity’s nemesis is neither god nor demon, but a hitherto invisible greenhouse gas!), it is difficult to advocate teaching this section of a book written in 1927 as a statement on anthropogenic climate change. What then is the value of thinking about this moment in the context of climate change? If greenhouse gases, anthropogenic or otherwise, remain largely invisible in the Western canon, how can teaching these classics contribute to students’ understanding about climate change? One contribution that classics can make is providing access to an environmen-
tal history that is deeper than the industrial revolution. In “‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty argues for histories of climate change that begin earlier than Watt’s steam engine or Smith’s invisible hand, contending that “while there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present” (Chakrabarty 212). Chakrabarty advocates putting global histories of capital into conversation with “deep history,” reaching beyond the ten thousand years since the emergence of agriculture to engage with the species history of humans (212). While the texts considered here are necessarily part of a recorded history that is much shallower than the deep history that Chakrabarty plumbs, they
offer students valuable insight into the classical roots of contemporary attitudes towards the environment in the West, with myth helping to provide a deeper history for the moral context of climate change. A central contention of Great Books courses is that by examining classics,
students can reflect upon their own moral lives; Columbia’s Core Curriculum, which literature humanities is part of, promises that the courses will “cultivate a critical and creative intellectual capacity that students employ long after college, in the pursuit and the fulfillment of meaningful lives” (Core Curriculum). The quotation that I use to introduce my syllabus – from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead – stresses the importance of reading classics in relation to contemporary issues. Imagining the contemporary writer as a traveller descending to a literary underworld stuffed with treasures of meaning, Atwood claims that “it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change” (Atwood 178-9). Asking students to consider what “treasure” classical texts offer in relation to environmental attitudes can be valuable. This treasure can seem rather rusty, with toxins accumulating over millennia, so that traces of contemporary practices of environmental degradation can perhaps be found in the dominion established by humans over their surroundings in both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. Many of the classics I teach present the non-human world as something to be named and tamed by humans, through scythe or simile: rivers are anthropomorphized; animals are named by Adam; trees are felled to provide boats, weapons, or poetic parallels to dead heroes. Yet, to only focus on the separation between humanity and nature in classical texts clearly belies the complex ecosystems they present and my goal is to help students come to their own understanding of the relationship between humans and their surroundings in the texts we read and to use these findings as a way to reflect upon their own moral attitudes towards their environment. Drawing from my experience as an instructor of literature humanities between 2011-2015, this chapter focuses on case studies of teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Genesis.
