cfp.english.upenn.edu

Teaching Thoreau’s “Wildness” in the Classroom: A Roundtable Discussion

While Thoreau famously insisted that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world," contemporary writers about environment have problematized the concept of wilderness. Indeed, one need not look further than the titles of William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” or Andrew Morton’s book Ecology Without Nature to notice the centrality of questions about representing the wild to ecocritical discourse. These and other texts lead us to ask, does the notion of the wild reinscribe an ultimately harmful distinction between human and non-human? How does the idea of nature as a human construction affect our understanding of real environmental devastation, like that brought about by the recent BP oil spill? This roundtable discussion will ask what role these and related questions play in approaches to teaching Thoreau. Please send queries or one-page abstracts (for a 5- to 8-minute presentation) by January 1, 2011, to: kristen.case@maine.edu. This panel is sponsored by The Thoreau Society.

A Session Sponsored by The Thoreau Society
American Literature Association--22nd Annual Conference, Boston, May 26-29, 2011
Kristen Case and Rochelle Johnson, Organizers