Below is the "Theories of Literature and the Environment" list for the First Qualifying Exam. Copies of all works are available in the English Department office. See the Graduate Program website for complete details on the First Qualifying Exam.

 

Theories Literature and the Environment List for the First Qualifying Exam

 

1. The Emergence of Environmental Thinking

Classical

1. Aristotle, from the Physics
2. Bible, Genesis I-IV, Deuteronomy IV, Song of Solomon, Romans I
3. Heraclites, from The Cosmic Fragments
4. Hesiod, from Works and Days
5. Horace, Epode II
6. Lecretius, De Rerum Natura
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses I
8. Plato, Cratylus and the central books of the Republic
9. Theocritus, Idylls I & VII
10. Varro, from On Agriculture
11. Virgil, Eclogues I, IV, & V; Georgics I

Medieval and Early Modern (through 1800)

12. Thomas Aquinas, from the Summa Theologica
13. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
14. William Blake, "A Chimney Sweeper" and "Auguries of Innocence" 
15. John Denham, Cooper's Hill
16. René Descartes, from Meditations on First Philosophy
17. “The Dream of the Rood”
18. John Evelyn, from Fumifugium
19. Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"
20. Richard Hakluyt, from "Discovery of Guiana by Raleigh"
21. Robert Herrick, "The Hock-cart, or Harvest home"
22. Ben Jonson, "To Penshurst," "The Praises of a Country Life," and "To Sir Robert Wroth"    
23. Immanuel Kant, from The Third Critique (of judgment)
24. Aemilia Lanyer, "The Description of Cooke Ham"
25. John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
26. Andrew Marvell, mower poems
27. Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest
28. George Puttenham, from The Arte of English Poesie
29. Jean Jacques Rousseau, from A Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of The Inequality of Mankind
30. From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
31. Edmund Spenser, from The Faerie Queene
32. Baruch Spinoza, from the Ethics

 19th Century

33. John Clare, from The Village Minstrel and Other Poems
34. Emily Dickinson, (selections)
35. Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species
36. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1837)
37. Friedrich Engels, from The Conditions of the Working Class
38. George P. Marsh, from The Earth as Modified by Human Action.
39. William Morris, from News from Nowhere
40. John Muir, from Our National Parks
41. John Ruskin, from Modern Painters
42. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc"
43. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (complete book)
44. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)
45. William Wordsworth, Michael and The Prelude

Early 20th Century through the 1950s

46. Mary Austin, “The Scavengers” from Land of Little Rain (1903)
47. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking"
48. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (complete book).
49. Arthur Lovejoy, "Some Meanings of 'Nature'" and "Nature as Aesthetic Norm"
50. Lewis Mumford, from The City

 

2. First-Wave Environmental Criticism

1960s and '70s

51. Hannah Arendt, "Labor, Work, Action"
52. Wendell Berry, from The Gift of Good Land
53. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (complete book)
54. Rene Dumont, "Manifesto for an Alternative Culture" 
55. Leo Marx, from The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
56. Carolyn Merchant, from The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
57. Gary Snyder,from Turtle Island (1975)
58. Yi-Fu Tuan, from Topophilia (1974)
59. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”
60. Raymond Williams, from The Country & the City; "Nature" and "Culture" from Keywords; "Ideas of Nature" from Culture & Materialism

1980s

61. Bill Devall and George Sessions, from Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered.
62. Bill McKibben, from The End of Nature
63. Arne Naess, "The Deep Ecological Movement" and "The Deep Ecology 'Eight Points' Revisited"
64. Paul Shepard, "Ecology and Man—A Viewpoint"
65. Michael Zimmerman, "Rethinking the Heidegger-Deep Ecology Relationship"  

1990s

66. Jonathan Bate, from Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition
67. Ulrich Beck, "Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity"
68. Lawrence Buell, from The Environmental Imagination; “Toxic Discourse”
69. Jeremy Cohen, from "Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It"
70. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness”
71. Terry Gifford, "Three Kinds of Pastoral" from Pastoral
72. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Study in an Age of Environmental Crisis”
73. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
74. Robert Pogue Harrison, from Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
75. N. Katherine Hayles, from How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, & Informatics
76. Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
77. Michael Pollan, from Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
78.  Simon Schama,from Landscape and Memory
79.  Leslie Marmon Silko, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination”

 

3. Second-Wave Environmental Criticism

2000s

80. J. M. Coetzee, from The Lives of Animals
81. Mei Mei Evans, "'Nature' and Environmental Justice"
82. Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman, Introduction to The Nature of Environmental Philosophy
83. Greg Garrard, from Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom
84. Robert T. Hayashi, "Beyond Walden Pond: Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism"
85. Ursula Heise, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism" and "Local Rock and Global Plastic"
86. Michiko Ishimure, "Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow"
87. Dale Jamieson, "Justice: The Heart of Environmentalism" 
88. Bruno Latour, "Why Political Ecology has to Let Go of Nature"
89. Juan Martinez-Alier, "The Environmentalism of the Poor" Chapter 1
90. Rob Nixon, "Environmentalism and Postcolonialism" in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond
91. Dana Philips, from The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America
92. T. V. Reed, "Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism"
93. Richard Watts "Contested Sources: Water as Commodity / Sign in the French Caribbean"
94. Peter Wenz, "Does Environmentalism Promote Injustice for the Poor?"
95. Jennifer Wenzel "Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature"

The Future of Environmental Criticism

96. Angus Fletcher, from A New Theory for American Poetry:  Democracy, the Environment, & the Future of Imagination
97. DavidHarvey, "Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development"
98. Graham Huggan, "'Greening' Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives" in Modern Fiction Studies
99. Richard Kerridge, "Environmentalism and Ecocriticism"
100. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
101. Vandana Shiva, from Biopiracy
102. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Chapters 3-5, Section II, “Knowledge”)
103. Robert N. Watson, from Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance.