ENL 5227 Spring 2022 Hand

Books of nature and books of beasts – the ancient wisdom of the Physiologus, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae – shaped early modern understandings of the natural world. But that world was itself a book, and discerned properly, the book of nature revealed its hidden meanings and the indelible stamp of the creator. Within that book was a lively bestiary of what we now call animals – what early moderns were more likely to call creatures, a term that also applied to humans. How did early moderns read nature’s book and themselves within it? How did interspecies relations and daily animal encounters influence early modern literature? How did literature, with its innumerable figures and tropes taken from the natural world, affect humans’ behavior toward other creatures within that world? How can we better understand and take seriously the extent to which the shaping fantasies of early modern culture were defined by the nonhuman? And how can an awareness of early moderns’ “thinking with animals” and the natural world help us make sense of environmental concerns in our own time? This course engages with such questions as an avenue for the study of ecocriticism. While our focus is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and its contexts, each unit also includes contemporary texts that invite us to consider the relations between a past before “the animal” as such, before the Anthropocene, and a present in which the catastrophic environmental effects of human acts are increasingly being felt. Students will develop a strong foundation in ecocriticism and animal studies which may then inform their teaching and research.