Subjects

COURSE DESCRIPTION
From its 19th-century beginnings American poetry has been concerned with man’s relationship to nature, which for long seemed vast and wild and indomitable, but this condition has changed dramatically. For more than two centuries, American poets have been deeply conscious of the presence of a world related to ours, but utterly different from it, and they tried to reach out to it, reflect on it and come to terms with it. Ecocritical perspective, which has become a significant trend in the last few decades, can offer interesting insights into these efforts. <br>
The course will focus on the study American poetry in relation to ecocritical thought, paying close attention to the works of the poets who see “non-human” presence as fundamental for our own existence in the world, and whose poetry explores the complex and deeply problematic relationship between the world of man and the world of nature. Apart from poetry, ecocritical texts will also be read, and both the possibilities and the limits of the ecocritical perspective on poetry will be discussed.
In each class we will discuss a limited number poems by two or three different poets – the goal is not to introduce each poet in all his or her complexity, but rather to present a variety of approaches to “eco” topics. The first two classes will deal with the 19th century and Modernism respectively, but the majority of the texts will be from the last seventy years of American poetry.

Last update: Machová Mariana, doc. PhDr., Ph.D. (13.02.2023)

ASSESSMENT

In-class participation: maximum of 3 missed classes, active participation in the discussion.

Reading: for each class every student is required to read all the assigned texts (poetry, criticism).

Group work: throughout the semester the students will be required to work in small groups. Each group will annotate one poem (or a critical text) for each class.

For the credit/zápočet: final submission of an annotated poem of the student’s choice with a commentary (NB: while this is not a standard essay usually required for a credit, it should correspond to it in terms of length and effort that goes into it; the detailes guidelines for the submission will be specified in the course of the semester).

For the graded paper/písemná práce: essay of 2500–3000 words offering a close-reading of a poem in the context of some of the topics discussed in the class; the detailed guidelines for the essay will be specified towards the end of the semester to the students interested in submitting a graded paper.

Last update: Machová Mariana, doc. PhDr., Ph.D. (07.02.2025)

Material

For each class the students will be asked to read some four or five poems and one essay.

The full detailed reading list will be available in the first class of the semester.

All the material for the class will be available on moodle.

Selected Bibliography:

Bryson, Scott J. The West Side of Any Mountain. Place, Space and Ecopoetry. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2005.

Bryson, Scott J., ed. Ecopoetry. A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002..

Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann and Laura Grey Street, eds. The Ecopoetry Anthology. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Garrard, Greg, ed. Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Griffiths, Matthew, ed. The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Keller, Lynn. Recomposing Ecopoetics. North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Kilcup, Karen L. Fallen Forests : Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Ryan, John Charles. Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. New York: Routlege, 2018.

Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Scigaj, Leonard M. “Contemporary Ecological and Environmental Poetry Différance or Référance?“ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 3, Issue 2, Fall 1996, pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/3.2.1

Last update: Machová Mariana, doc. PhDr., Ph.D. (03.02.2023)

1. Introduction

2. Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

3. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore

4. Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop

5. David Wagoner, W. S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

6. Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin

7. Louise Glück, Jorie Graham

8. Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo

9. Lucille Clifton, G. E. Patterson, Tommy Pico

10. Students' selection of poems

Last update: Machová Mariana, doc. PhDr., Ph.D. (17.02.2025)