Studies in Environment and Place

This course will be a seminar examination of the complex intersection of four principal terms or areas of concern: 1) self-identity or person, as shaped and marked by 2) place, by an embeddedness in the density of history and locality; 3) how these interleaved formations are inflected by the cultural and national programs of the British and American 19th and 20th centuries; and 4) the inevitable and irreducible medium of the material and inhabited environment in which life is lived, whether productively, indeed, healthily, or not. John Elder, writing in Reading the Mountains of Home (1998), calls attention to “the natural, historical, and aesthetic thickness of the landscape.” This “thickness” or density gathers and pools in local places, such as the Haverford College campus. Such places resist, never successfully, the mutable forces of time and technological change. We will study what J. E. Malpas sees as the “idea of human life as essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identity found in place, and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the ‘human’”(Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999). Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, as well, of the political agency of place studies, since our human cultures are and have been threatened by spatial notions of conquest and colonization; terrible consequences are unavoidable “unless space (as territory which is mappable, explorable) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in).” One of our principal means in the course will be to read autobiographical narratives where to recollect the self is to remember landscape, where to remember the past, to press upon history (one’s own as nested in a specific temporal horizon) is to understand what has been sponsored by a particular place. As we do this, we will also turn repeatedly to questions about how the local environment is an expression of larger forces, even as it may serve as a protest or resistance to the erasure of its uniqueness, its organic and cultural inheritance. How do we preserve our home, our college landscape, in its relationship to its neighborhood, its local water-courses, flora and fauna, in the midst of gathering ecological crisis and large-scale indifference to the landscape’s fragile inscape and material memory?

Readings: Primary readings will be gathered from texts mostly British and American, from the 19th century and 20th century. We will read widely in theoretical texts concerned with the cultural production of landscape and in the polemical literature of environmentalism.

We will read Wordsworth, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hardy, Dickinson, Roethke, James Wright, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and William Least Heat Moon.

Secondary readings will include Heidegger (“Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing”), Pierre Nora (Les Lieux de Memoire), Hoskins (Making of the English Landscape), J. B. Jackson (A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time), John Elder (as above), James Corner (“Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice”), Pierce Lewis (“Axioms for Reading the Landscape”), Meinig (Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes), Groth and Bressi (Understanding Ordinary Landscapes) McKibben (The End of Nature), Casey (Getting Back into Place), Malpas (as above), Elizabeth Grosz (Architecture from the Outside), and Hartman (The Unremarkable Wordsworth).

Film resources: Three or four films will be shown, at intervals, to accompany the course, from work by Mark Rydell, Peter Weir, Carol Ballard, Christopher Monger, and Jim Sheridan.

Boots, as well as books: Members of the seminar will be encouraged (sometimes led) to walk, investigate, and observe local gardens and ordinary landscapes, in addition to our time in the Magill Library Archive, which contains a wide collection--from nearly two centuries--of documents about our immediate locality.

Class requirements: Two shorter writing exercises/responses (1-2 pages); two essays, one shorter (2-3 pages), one longer (4-5), and a final term essay or web project on place/environment studies, or place memoir (10-12 pages). Members of the class will be invited to consider projects that will be included in Finley and JaeHee Cho’s “A Sense of Place” website (to be launched by June ’08), meant to provide an articulated history of the campus grounds and to include ongoing contributions from members past and present of the seminar.

Class enrollment is limited to 15.