The Literature of Nature
A guiding theme of the work of the Center for Humans and Nature is the question of how and why the human and the natural worlds (culture and nature) interact; how cultural perceptions of—and attitudes toward—nature come to be developed, shaped, and revised over time. It is clear that the organized practice and discourse called “science” is one principal source of this dynamic, but the descriptive and imaginative practices and discourses called “literature” are also powerful forces in their own right. Within the field of literature, this project will focus on both the masterpieces of the literature of nature (e.g., Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle; and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, just to name a few) and also the important new field of “eco-criticism” within literary studies. This field has already generated an interesting perspective and debate on the proper relationship between the biological sciences and the humanities.
The purpose of this project will be to explore major works in this genre and to analyze the ways in which their creative language works to enlarge both our factual or descriptive knowledge and our moral and aesthetic appreciation of nature’s diversity, wonder, and value. The project is motivated by the hypothesis that the imagination shaped by literature is just as important as the understanding shaped by science in supporting ecological democratic citizenship. We will be especially concerned to find what insights it brings to our understanding of how democratic consciousness coevolves in the course of concrete humans-in-nature interactions.