English 189: Literature and the Environment
Dr. Newmark

Essay One Assignment
Due: Wednesday, March 3
Length: Four to Five pages

Please choose one of the following questions and answer it, with a prominently placed thesis (in the first paragraph), in a four- to five-page essay. In this essay you will need to quote from your primary text on numerous (probably at least four) occasions. You are also required to quote from, and correctly cite following MLA guidelines, at least one scholarly source. The article that you use as your scholarly source must come from a peer-reviewed journal or from one of the library's critical anthologies (check reserves). You cannot use a book review or an abstract as a scholarly source. The whole paper must follow MLA guidelines. Please use Times New Roman font, 12 point, and double-space throughout your paper.

1. We began the semester discussing how, following Lawrence Buell and Greg Garrard, pieces of environmental literature, according to many ecocritics, put "human dramas" on the sidelines and offer, instead, a biocentric worldview. Please choose a poem (preferably, or a short essay or story) that we have read thus far in which there seems to be no human agent; choose a poem that seems to simply capture or describe place. By closely reading and analyzing the poem (and indicating its possible purpose), please offer a viable meaning for the text and reveal how the poem does or does not satisfy other of Lawrence Buell's identifactory criteria for "environmental texts" (see this semester's first set of notes). Please carefully follow MLA guidelines for in-text citations of poetry.

2. Please choose one text we have read thus far and explain how it strives to pursuade the reader to revise the default Euro-American anthropocentric approach to nature and adopt an activist, radically changed relationship to natural place. Some texts do this more subtly than others (and choosing a "subtle text" will make for an interesting essay). How does the focal site of the text you've chosen offer a differently configured notion of "place"? How does the author "populate" this place in his/her text in an ecologically sensitive way, in a way that perhaps addresses power, hegemony, or present-day (or past) geopolitical issues?