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School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
This course invites you to engage closely with works of fiction and non-fiction that exemplify and experiment with ‘nature’ and ‘retreat’ as concepts central to American aesthetics. You will be introduced to theories about both ‘nature’ and ‘retreat’, while exploring aesthetic and philosophical experiments with these concepts. You will read the canonical works of nineteenth-century writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Frederick Douglass alongside a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first fiction and non-fiction. In doing so, you will both critically analyse and creatively experiment with words, images and other elements central to how past and present thinkers have conceptualised such topics as being, time, place, self & community, solitude & solace, freedom and the divine while taking a critical stance on issues such as capitalist production and consumption, technological change, war trauma, climate and more.
critical and/or creative concept exercise (20 minutes per weekly in-class written exercise)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3
short written exercise (1000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3
major critical and comparative essay (2,500 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 36 hours of contact: 24 hours of lectures and 12 hours of tutorials. b) 94 hours of independent student research, reading and writing.
N/A Minor Amendments Only Preliminary Reading Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Penguin, based on original 1855 edition) Henry David Thoreau, Walden Herman Melville, ‘Bartley the Scrivener’ Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods (2017) Leave No Trace (2017; director Debra Granik)