English 513--Suggestions for Assignments

Keeping a Journal

Most nature writing begins with entries in a journal. Thoreau's journals fill dozens of volumes, and out of them, long after the daily experiences had passed, he culled and cultivated the words of his books. We'll be reading a sample of them in Finch and Elder 193-207. Journal keeping is good for producing raw material for finished work, but it's also valuable in itself. The solitary communication between diarist and notebook resembles communication between observer and landscape--what John Donne in his poem, "The Extasie," called "a dialogue of one."

Get or make yourself a nice blank book for reading and writing the landscape in this class. Keep it with you often and write in it at least three times a week, dating each entry. In addition to observations and reflections, the journal can include drawings, photos, diagrams, and quotations. You'll be asked to share it with me and members of the class, so reserve private material for a different journal.

Topics to write about will be suggested by the readings, the class discussion and walks. You may want to steer your journal entries toward later writing assignments--the critical analysis of an ecoliterary work, a class discussion of a short reading, and the final essay.

Here are some suggestions from The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook by John A. Murray

• write a journal that covers a season, note changes in nature
• take trip and record all impressions--focus on self as much as wild nature; find climax--revelation, decision, resolution, turning toward, turning away.
• write journal entry in stream of consciousness mode; take object or occurrence in nature as point of departure. write till you've exhausted your theme and write more past that point
• observe a proces of nature and write a journal entry recording your observations in detail. e.g. snow falling in a woods, storm building over the prairie, tide coming in
• write entry chronicling a powerful childhood memory about nature...relate it to events and perspectives in your life today.
• keep journal to record your response to various nature writings you have read. which are successful and which are not? Why? which authors have something to teach you and which do not? and why. how would you approach the themes differntly.

Another classic example of a nature writing journal is Susan Cooper's http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/cooper/hours/spring.html

Examples of students' journal entries can be found dispersed throughout Ecolit Journal

Leading the Discussion

Starting with the fifth session, each person will lead the discussion of one of our short group readings, numbered in parentheses on the course syllabus. The readings vary between five and thirty pages in length; the discussion of each should last between twenty and thirty minutes.

These are some suggestions of how to prepare and what might work. Feel free to ignore them and use alternate approaches that you find more congenial or suited to the material at hand.

• Offer selective background information on author, larger work from which the passage was taken, historical setting, e.g. prior and later influences, using projected Web pages if helpful.
• Read the passage several times and outline it, so that you have a clear sense of what's in it and how the parts relate to the whole--granted that the whole is only a snippet. If you care to, distribute a hard or electronic copy of your outline to the class in advance.
• Select several passages to read aloud--with dramatic and musical emphasis. Prepare a set of observations about the passages--information, vivid description, theme, structure (transition and emphasis), metaphor, symbolism, authorial voice, allusion--but try to elicit such observations from other members of the group before offering your own.
• Relate elements of the selection to other readings in this class--both literary and scientific--especially those due on the same day.
• Discover techniques that can provide models for imitation and variation in our nature writing.
• Get people to agree or disagree about aspects of the writing you find strong and weak.

Book Report

This is an oral presentation to the class of material that has been or will be included in your ecocritical essay. The purpose is to acquaint those of us who havent read the book with some of its highlights, interesting passages, and your interpretive take on it. The presentation should last no more than ten minutes including question and answer period.

Ecocritical Essay

This is the kind of essay that might get published in a scholarly journal like ISLE [Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment] or PMLA, or in a journal with a general readership, like Salmagundy or Hudson Review. Among other topics, you may want to touch upon

• biographical background and other works by the same author
• placement of the author in relation to others influencing or influenced by them
• salient themes that unify and structure the whole
• ways the conventions of ecoliterature are adhered to or departed from
• patterns of beginning, elaboration and conclusion and moments of heightened emphasis
• positions on controversial issues that you agree or disagree with
• identifying marks of style--their strengths and weaknesses
• methods of conveying both information and feeling
• rhetorical devices--vivid description, changes of tone and pace, aspects of design and ornament, multiple meanings or irony, humor--that you have discovered by careful and repeated reading

Be generous with short quotations of phrases that you like and that give the flavor of the author's writing, and include one or two longer citations which analyse in some detail.