CCOG for ENG 269 Spring 2024
- Course Number:
- ENG 269
- Course Title:
- Wilderness Literature
- Credit Hours:
- 4
- Lecture Hours:
- 40
- Lecture/Lab Hours:
- 0
- Lab Hours:
- 0
Course Description
Intended Outcomes for the course
Upon completion of the course students should be able to:
- Use literary analysis to understand, critique, and discuss writings about wilderness and the natural world, recognizing important themes, concepts, and issues.
- Recognize how literature shapes and challenges our attitudes and actions towards nature—and how our ideas about the meaning of wilderness continue to evolve.
- Apply an understanding of wilderness literature to the vision of global environmental sustainability.
- Write clearly about the complex ideas and questions pertaining to the literature of wilderness and the natural world.
Integrative Learning
Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.
General education philosophy statement
English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding each other and navigating our differences. In literature classes, students explore significant texts from diverse cultures and periods in history. Students look closely at texts from a range of genres, articulating the way elements of writing, content, form, and style are interrelated, and considering how values and interpretations have changed over time and through different theoretical lenses. Students engage texts through critical analysis and creative response, learning to use evidence to support their interpretations and to navigate critical conversations. Students explore literature both as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms, and as an expression of human experience. Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.
Course Activities and Design
Students will read and discuss assigned course materials, responding in writing assignments both formal and informal. Class time may include lecture, small- and large-group discussion, reading and annotating poems and other texts, viewing film clips, listening to audio, giving individual and group presentations, doing group in-class projects, and possibly taking excursions outside of the classroom.
Outcome Assessment Strategies
Tools for assessment may include quizzes, reading responses, oral presentations, tests, midterm exam, final exam, field reports, film reviews, formal academic essays, in-class writing, and out-of-class writing.
Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)
Point-of-view, characterization, structure, setting, tone, diction, persuasion/argument, description, figurative language, genres of wilderness literature (e.g., personal essay, profile, historical realism, satire, field notes, diary, short story, polemic, novel, poetry, fiction, documentary and narrative film), Colonial Era, Age of Romanticism, Garden of Eden, Transcendentalism, Age of Realism, Naturalism, Wilderness, tourism, leisure, the sublime, the frontier, mountains, Manifest Destiny, democracy, the Oregon Trail, animals and animal rights, risk, surviving wilderness, U.S. federal government, industry and mechanization, conservation, communitarian/individual experience of nature, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Wilderness Act of 1964, National Wildlife Refuge System, role of human beings in the natural world, The Chain of Being, interdependence of nature and culture, environmental movement, defending wilderness, bio?diversity, global environmental sustainability, eco-criticism, gender, women and wilderness, deep ecology, eco-defense, wilderness in western and eastern religions, class and race in the construction of wilderness, rethinking wilderness, “wildness,” dualism, the practice of the wild, hunting, agriculture, gardening, nature and work, urban forestry, landscape design, adventure travel, nature?deficit disorder, concept of the commons (e.g., ocean and sky), NPS Night Sky Team, dark sky movement.
Skills and competencies: close reading, analysis, synthesis, writing about literature, oral presentations, discussion, independent research, developing personal positions, defending personal positions.