I: Introduction

1. The connection between Romanticism and ecology has often been recognized in the critical literature on Romanticism and in the writings of ecologists and naturalists. Recently Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, Jim McKusick, Onno Oerlemans, and Kate Rigby have published important books on the subject,[1] and The Wordsworth Circle, Studies in Romanticism, and Romantic Circles Praxis Series have published special issues on the topic.[2] By and large, these books and the articles in the collections argue that we can trace the origins of our current ecological thinking to European Romanticism in general, and sometimes to British and American Romanticism in particular. A similar trend to link various strands of our current environmental thinking to Romantic ur-texts may be found in the works of environmental historians, geographers, and environmentalists, such as Neal Evernden, Max Oelschlager, I. G. Simmons, and Donald Worster, among others. In Worster's Nature's Economy, a key history of ecological thought, we read that "at the very core of [the] Romantic view of nature was what later generations would come to call an ecological perspective: that is, a search for holistic or integrated perception, an emphasis on interdependence and relatedness in nature, and an intense desire to restore man to a place of intimate intercourse with the vast organism that constitutes the earth"   (82). More recently, in his introduction to "Romanticism and Ecology," a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle, Jim McKusick pointedly and rightly, I think, claims that "much Romantic writing emerges from a desperate sense of alienation from the natural world and expresses an anxious endeavor to re-establish a vital, sustainable relationship between mankind and the fragile planet on which [we] dwell" (123). These statements point to a position that many recent writers have defended, albeit from divergent and importantly nuanced perspectives: Romantic literature is a germinal site for the rise of ecological consciousness and practices.

2. The affiliation between Romanticism and ecology nonetheless remains problematic. On the one hand, Romantic nature philosophy has been linked, as in Luc Ferry's The New Ecological Order, with oppressive and totalitarian political dispositions. On the other hand, Romanticism has been reduced to a simplistic nostalgia for a lost unity with nature, or worse, as a rhapsodic celebration of beautiful scenery. In reply to such critics as Ferry, Val Plumwood in Environmental Culture reminds us that "While it is important to note the role of those forms of Romanticism corrupted by the desire for unity and other oppressive forces, any analysis which puts all its stress on this factor ignores the diversity and liberatory aspects of some forms of Romanticism. . . . " (208). In response to the reductive view of Romanticism as nature worship, William Cronon and Paul Fry, among others, remind us that Romantic representations of nature reflect not so much actual places and encounters as virtual landscapes and experiences that mirror their writers' projected desires and culturally mediated values. Cronon's "The Trouble With Wilderness," for example, cites Wordsworth's description of the Simplon Pass experience (Prelude, Book 6) and Thoreau's account of climbing Mt. Ktaadn to point up what he calls the "unnaturalness" of natural places rendered through the Romantic eye, informed as it is with Judaeo-Christian ideas of the wilderness and Kantian notions of the sublime (73). Moreover, as Ralph Pite warns in "How Green were the Romantics," while it is important and productive to link Romanticism with ecology, doing so often leads to oversimplifications and confusion, in that Romantic poetry may be used "to support any number of different [and one might add mutually contradictory] versions of ecology" (317);  Pite believes that  our definition of "green poetry" may become so broad or so restrictive a category that the term becomes unworkable (359). One of the objectives of the course sketched out below is to problematize our understanding of the Romantic apprehension and representation of nature, so that we begin to account for its intertextual and cultural mediations even as we recognize its more or less genuine, but nonetheless partial and vexed,  attempt to grasp the natural world with as much immediacy and transparency as language will allow, and  its effort to articulate a dynamic reciprocity between human beings and the natural world.
   

   II: Romanticism, Nature, Ecology: The Course
   

3. The course described here is designed to study the relationship between Romantic literature—especially that of the Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Clare—and the environment. Drawing upon a few key philosophical texts from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, as well as from present-day critical works of ecological literary criticism, environmental literature, and philosophy, the course encourages reflection upon what constitutes environmental literature, how such literature shapes environmental consciousness and action, and how Romantic poetry engages urgent issues that face us today about the relationship between human consciousness and nature, and about the structures of consciousness and feeling that predispose us to act in certain ways within our environment. Rather than turn to Romanticism as a guide to current environmental practices, our interest is in Romanticism as a site for the emergence of ecopoetics and as a discourse that opens up critical questions and lines of investigation about our  human place in the life world. [SEE SYLLABUS]

4. The course is divided into four units of varying lengths: I: Introduction and Outline of Problem; II: Nature and Culture; III: Romantic Aesthetics and Nature; and IV: Romanticism, Nature, Ecology. Using the concept of "discursive clusters," sets of works that approach certain topics from a variety of perspectives in order to promote discussion and sometimes to orchestrate a kind of imaginary conversation among works, each unit includes a series of primary readings for each week, accompanied by a pair of "Critical Works" that either critically and sometimes historically contextualize the issues and ideas raised in the primary readings. Unit I focuses on Michel Serres's The Natural Contract, which presents a critical view of the breach of contract that characterizes our current relationship to the life world. Underscoring the critical importance of recalibrating our relationship to the natural world, The Natural Contract inaugurates the course with a sense of urgency that may persuade students to make a serious intellectual investment in the explorations that will follow.   Unit II offers a brief genealogical perspective on Romantic nature philosophy and ecopoetics in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Reading selections from Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Denis Diderot, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, we spend two weeks discussing enlightenment ideas about mechanism, dualism, the wild, the primitive, and the noble savage. Unit III introduces Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and William Gilpin as the major architects of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, mechanisms that at least in part structure our perceptions of and responses to the natural world.

5. Having established some of the key concepts that inform early nineteenth-century dispositions toward the environment, Unit IV moves to the heart of the course: the poetry and prose of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Clare—along with some other writers, such as Thomas Malthus and Charlotte Smith. Taking up more than half of the course, this unit considers the various ways these writers theorize and represent the sense of interdependence between human beings and nature, the reciprocal bond that anticipates Serres's idea of the natural contract, and  agency—both natural and human. Drawing from a variety of "Critical Works"—by writers from Geoffrey Hartman and Jonathan Bate to Aldo Leopold and Walker Percy—throughout this unit we use discursive clusters to challenge the reductive stereotypes of Romanticism either as a will to power and mastery or as a nostalgic and simple love for nature. Moreover, we discuss the way Romanticism reacts against, transforms, and sometimes perpetuates some of the modes of perception and understanding it inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

6. Note: The course described here is designed for upper-division undergraduates or first-year graduate students who have some acquaintance with British and ideally American or European Romanticism as well. Students who have taken a form of this course have noted in their teaching evaluations that the reading load is challenging, while at the same time they have generally praised the course for being comprehensive and opening up multiple and divergent perspectives on Romanticism and ecology. Because of its modular design, the course can easily be modified to adjust the contents and/or the pace of the course. By dropping units two and/or three, for example, the course could focus more directly upon  the literary texts, which could be supplemented by works from other writers, such as Ann Radcliffe, Byron, the Shelleys (Frankenstein, for example, teaches very well alongside Serres's The Natural Contract), and, to flesh out American Romanticism and ecology, Emerson, Thoreau, and Susan Cooper, among others. To recover some of the historical and philosophical background lost in that trade off, students might be asked to give individual or seminar-style presentations or to participate in focus-group discussions every two or three weeks. Another way to simplify the course would be to scale back some of the critical readings assigned for each week.

7. Unit I: Introduction and Outline of Problem focuses on the first two chapters of Michel Serres's The Natural Contract which critique our contemporary environmental predicament and bring a sense of urgency to the  questions and issues we will discuss throughout the class. Serres brilliantly interprets Goya's Men Fighting with Cudgels as a visual metaphor for the struggle between nature and culture, invoking this binary polarization in order to problematize it later in his text. For Serres, the two antagonists of Goya's painting represent history. As they fight, they remain oblivious to the bog into which they are sinking, and which represents nature. If the two men keep fighting and continue to ignore nature, they will eventually succumb to it. Thus nature, the world-wide system of objects and living things upon which humanity depends for its survival, will emerge from its subordinated position as a neglected third term and become a force which the men, perhaps putting down their own differences, will have to acknowledge, or with which they will have to reckon. For Serres, we are at or near that point of reckoning, and to preclude the eventuality of a serious catastrophe, Serres calls for a contract between humanity and nature—a contract, in part modeled after Rousseau's social contract, that will acknowledge nature as a fully-fledged partner in a community of agents with reciprocal and equal rights to protection under the law. A natural contract self-consciously guaranteeing the rights of symbiosis would offer a mutually beneficial alternative to the parasitic relationship that collective humanity now holds with Nature in its totality.

8. Serres's analysis leads us directly to the questions about interdependence, holism, agency, and reciprocity that we will find in Malthus, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Clare. Like Malthus, Serres reminds us of nature's under-acknowledged power to wage war against humanity, and like Wordsworth he questions what it means to acknowledge the natural world effectively and meaningfully so as to foster a mutually beneficial relationship. Establishing the urgent need for a natural contract based upon the self-conscious acknowledgement of and love for Nature, which Serres recognizes as a creative and destructive, dynamic and indifferent force, The Natural Contract may encourage students to begin their reading of Romantic texts with a sense of the legacies of Romantic nature philosophy and the need to refigure the metaphors we use to construct our relationship to nature.

9. Because Serres does not deal explicitly with ecocriticism or ecopoetics, I ask students to read the introductory chapters of three important books of environmental criticism: Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination, and Jim McKusick's Green Writing. Placing these three books into play highlights the overlapping issues of ecocriticism, establishing some grounds for the students' own thinking and writing. First, Bate's introduction challenges the binary opposition between nature and culture, using Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy to tease out the ways that culture is always already imbedded in nature, just as nature is always already imbedded