Literature, Writing, and the Natural World

Literature, Writing, and the Natural World PDF Author: James Guignard
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities held its annual meeting in 2006 at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania. The conference theme was “Literature, Writing, and the Natural World.” This collection grows out of the conference and indicates the desire to understand all aspects of our relationship with the natural world, the function of literature in clarifying that relationship (in ways science and politics cannot), and the role of the literature teacher-scholar wanting to respond to pressures of environmental change. In these times, interpretation is a vital task, not only for the way it educates us about our attitudes toward nature, but because it develops the crucial skills of looking closely, engaging, reflecting, and responding. One could argue that, as a culture, Americans are behind the curve in understanding the ways we depend upon a healthy relationship with nature, and one way (among many) depends upon examining it through texts and textual representation. When the writers here dig into The Main Woods, Jayber Crow, the poetry of Pablo Guevara, or the movie Crash, they are contributing to our understanding of the ways in which we view nature and how that view plays a role in the way we relate to nature. These days, many disciplines engage global warming and other environmental issues routinely, and the literature classroom should be no different. Just as we read a book and address fundamental themes such as “What does it mean to love?” or “How do we develop identity?” we should also be asking “What is my responsibility when I decide what resources to use?” If we understand literature as equipment for living in a warming world, we may be able to help students make some sense out of their world and some decisions about how to act.

Literature, Writing, and the Natural World

Literature, Writing, and the Natural World PDF Author: James Guignard
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
The English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities held its annual meeting in 2006 at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania. The conference theme was “Literature, Writing, and the Natural World.” This collection grows out of the conference and indicates the desire to understand all aspects of our relationship with the natural world, the function of literature in clarifying that relationship (in ways science and politics cannot), and the role of the literature teacher-scholar wanting to respond to pressures of environmental change. In these times, interpretation is a vital task, not only for the way it educates us about our attitudes toward nature, but because it develops the crucial skills of looking closely, engaging, reflecting, and responding. One could argue that, as a culture, Americans are behind the curve in understanding the ways we depend upon a healthy relationship with nature, and one way (among many) depends upon examining it through texts and textual representation. When the writers here dig into The Main Woods, Jayber Crow, the poetry of Pablo Guevara, or the movie Crash, they are contributing to our understanding of the ways in which we view nature and how that view plays a role in the way we relate to nature. These days, many disciplines engage global warming and other environmental issues routinely, and the literature classroom should be no different. Just as we read a book and address fundamental themes such as “What does it mean to love?” or “How do we develop identity?” we should also be asking “What is my responsibility when I decide what resources to use?” If we understand literature as equipment for living in a warming world, we may be able to help students make some sense out of their world and some decisions about how to act.

Earth Joy Writing

Earth Joy Writing PDF Author: Cassie Premo Steele
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
ISBN: 161822039X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
A seasonal journey to creative and joyful writing In Earth Joy Writing, Cassie Premo Steele draws upon her life’s work as a teacher of writing, literature, and mindfulness to help writers foster a greater connection between the natural world and their own creativity. Earth Joy Writing is a writer’s guide to reconnecting to the earth. In chapters divided by seasons and months of the year, this book will guide you through reflections, exercises, meditations, and journaling prompts—all designed to help you connect more deeply with yourself, others, and your natural surroundings. Weaving together poetry, stories, and cultural wisdom, Earth Joy Writing invites us to consider our connection to the earth and offers hands-on exercises that will help us meaningfully reconnect with our creative selves and with the planet we all share.

Rontel

Rontel PDF Author: Sam Pink
Publisher: Thumbs Down Press
ISBN: 9781513655635
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
From the author of 'person' and 'the ice cream man and other stories.' Follow our narrator as he attempts to make it to the end of a journey most magical. Get ready to laugh and have nice times!

Writing for an Endangered World

Writing for an Endangered World PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674029057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

Beyond Nature Writing

Beyond Nature Writing PDF Author: Karla Armbruster
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920146
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Together, their work signals a new direction in the field and offers refreshingly original insights into a broad spectrum of texts.

Human Life and the Natural World

Human Life and the Natural World PDF Author: Owen Goldin
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551111070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Human concern over the urgency of current environmental issues increasingly entails wide-ranging discussions of how we may rethink the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. In order to provide a context for such discussions this anthology provides a selection of some of the most important, interesting and influential readings on the subject from classical times through to the late nineteenth century. Included are such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, St Francis of Assisi, Bacon, Descartes, Kant, Mill, Emerson and Thoreau. As the collection as a whole amply demonstrates, the history of western philosophical accounts of nature can help us to better understand current attitudes and problems. Human Life and the Natural World may also be of interest to a broad range of philosophers and students of philosophy, and more generally to those with a concern for the environment that engages the intellect as well as the heart.

DIY MFA

DIY MFA PDF Author: Gabriela Pereira
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1599639343
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Get the Knowledge Without the College! You are a writer. You dream of sharing your words with the world, and you're willing to put in the hard work to achieve success. You may have even considered earning your MFA, but for whatever reason--tuition costs, the time commitment, or other responsibilities--you've never been able to do it. Or maybe you've been looking for a self-guided approach so you don't have to go back to school. This book is for you. DIY MFA is the do-it-yourself alternative to a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. By combining the three main components of a traditional MFA--writing, reading, and community--it teaches you how to craft compelling stories, engage your readers, and publish your work. Inside you'll learn how to: • Set customized goals for writing and learning. • Generate ideas on demand. • Outline your book from beginning to end. • Breathe life into your characters. • Master point of view, voice, dialogue, and more. • Read with a "writer's eye" to emulate the techniques of others. • Network like a pro, get the most out of writing workshops, and submit your work successfully. Writing belongs to everyone--not only those who earn a degree. With DIY MFA, you can take charge of your writing, produce high-quality work, get published, and build a writing career.

Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World

Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World PDF Author: Kevin Maier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781606353189
Category : Nature in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ernest Hemingway is a writer we often associate with particular places and animals; Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Spain's countryside, East Africa's game reserves, Cuba's blue water, and Idaho's sagebrush all come to mind. We can easily visualize the iconic images of Hemingway with fly rod bent by hefty trout, with bulls charging matadors, or of the famous author proudly posing with trophy lions, marlin, and a menagerie of Western American game animals. As Robert E. Fleming once put it--updating Gertrude Stein's famous quip that Hemingway looked like a modern and smelled of museums--Hemingway "was also a hunter, fisherman, and naturalist who smelled of libraries." Hemingway indeed read widely in natural history and science, as well as the literature of field sports. This lifelong interest in the natural world and its inhabitants manifests itself in Hemingway's writing in myriad ways. From the trout Nick Adams carefully releases to Santiago's marlin and Robert Jordan's "heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest" to Colonel Cantwell's beloved Italian duck marshes, and from African savannahs to the Gulf Stream, animals and environments are central to Hemingway's work and life. While these representations often served as background for broader human-centered matters in early scholarship, contemporary critics have opted to treat animals and environments directly. Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World marks a key entry in Hemingway studies, bringing the questions from the rapidly evolving field of environmental literary studies to bear on Hemingway's places, animals, and life. It not only advances scholarship on Hemingway's relationship to the natural world, but it also facilitates bringing this understanding to the classroom. This latest volume in the Teaching Hemingway series explores how his writing sheds light on broader questions of the human relationship to the nonhuman world. Organized geographically, the 16 essays by leading scholars are divided into five sections about Hemingway's favorite places. Each essay includes specific classroom advice as well as theoretically sophisticated close readings.

Good Observers of Nature

Good Observers of Nature PDF Author: Tina Gianquitto
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336556
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In "Good Observers of Nature" Tina Gianquitto examines nineteenth-century American women's intellectual and aesthetic experiences of nature and investigates the linguistic, perceptual, and scientific systems that were available to women to describe those experiences. Many women writers of this period used the natural world as a platform for discussing issues of domesticity, education, and the nation. To what extent, asks Gianquitto, did these writers challenge the prevalent sentimental narrative modes (like those used in the popular flower language books) and use scientific terminology to describe the world around them? The book maps the intersections of the main historical and narrative trajectories that inform the answer to this question: the changing literary representations of the natural world in texts produced by women from the 1820s to the 1880s and the developments in science from the Enlightenment to the advent of evolutionary biology. Though Gianquitto considers a range of women's nature writing (botanical manuals, plant catalogs, travel narratives, seasonal journals, scientific essays), she focuses on four writers and their most influential works: Almira Phelps (Familiar Lectures on Botany, 1829), Margaret Fuller (Summer on the Lakes, in 1843), Susan Fenimore Cooper (Rural Hours, 1850), and Mary Treat (Home Studies in Nature, 1885). From these writings emerges a set of common concerns about the interaction of reason and emotion in the study of nature, the best vocabularies for representing objects in nature (local, scientific, or moral), and the competing systems for ordering the natural world (theological, taxonomic, or aesthetic). This is an illuminating study about the culturally assumed relationship between women, morality, and science.

Literature and the Environment

Literature and the Environment PDF Author: George Hart
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313061661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The phrase literature and environment only achieved popularity in recent decades, yet writers dating back to the explorers of the 1500s—and later such 19th-century Romanticists as Thoreau—have long been addressing environmental issues through literary expression. This volume introduces students and educators to the field by tracing the evolution of environmental writing in the United States. Chapters written by distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on important environmental issues, guiding readers through 11 carefully selected literary works. Each chapter provides brief biographical information on the author, discussions of the work's structural, thematic, and stylistic components, and insights into the historical context that relates the work to relevant environmental issues. Each chapter concludes with information on works cited. The analyzed works cover a wide spectrum of literature and span nearly 100 years. Included are early writings, such as Mary Austin's 1903 The Land of Little Rain, and famous groundbreaking works, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974). Also included are frequently assigned works of special interest to students, such as The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), The Earthsea Trilogy (1977), and Ceremony (1977). A list of selected further suggested readings completes the volume. Students of literature, as well as educators looking for new ways to present social issues, will find many ideas and much inspiration in this volume.