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In this essays, please address one of the following questions, using at least two peer-reviewed scholarly sources to help you support your argument. These sources, again, must come from peer-reviewed journals (do not use book reviews, interviews, or short text summaries). Be sure that your essay features, on page one, a strong and arguable claim – otherwise known as a "thesis"—that you provide evidence and analysis to support over the duration of your essay.
1. A text – a poem, a novel, a memoir – is itself an "environment." Of course, we are examining such environments as they engage with/represent the "natural world," and thus exist within the categorization "environmental literature." Please choose two texts that you have read over the second half of our semester that differ significantly from each other in terms of form. What is the relationship between the text’s form and its message? Because these "messages" concern the relationship between humans and the environment, or they concerns a particular dimension of the indifferent-to-humans environmental domain, how does the textual environment help, hurt, or have no impact on the delivery of the message? To make an “unconventional” point, do the authors you have chosen craft "unconventional" textual environments? 2. Please choose two texts that feature "nonhuman actors" in prominent roles. How do these "nonhuman" actors mediate between the human textual subject and the broader "environment"? In what roles do the authors place their nonhuman subjects, and to what effect? |