Teaching American environmental literature abroad.

Abstract

An effective strategy for teaching American environmental literature to an international audience uses a bioregional approach, rather than a chronological or thematic one, which enables students to understand the geographic as well as literary/cultural diversity of the U.S. Slovenian students were receptive to the course theme and approach, though they commented on some cultural differences about nature. Generally, they thought that nature and culture are more integrated in the lives of Slovenians, though this alone did not explain the lack of their own environmental literature tradition. The students found a powerful antiwar message in the online writings of the same authors in the course text. They found that environmental literature accomplishes two goals simultaneously: it both calls their attention to the calamities and potential horrors on the one hand, but also to the beauty, balance and peaceful coexistence that nature inspires on the other.

Background and Course Organization

During the spring of 2003, I had to opportunity to visit and teach in Slovenia as a visiting Fulbright lecturer. I was assigned two courses in American literature, one on the nineteenth century and one on the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century course I taught as a straightforward survey, wishing to expose international students to some of the main currents in American literary studies. For the twentieth-century course, I changed the approach and organization.

A Bioregional Approach

I divided the U.S. into bioregions: New England, River/Delta/Gulf, Appalachia, Great Lakes, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, Pacific Rim, Florida Everglades, and Far North. With each region, we read selected non-fiction works from the Norton Book of Nature Writing, supplemented with fiction and poetry from Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture, handouts of stories by Faulkner ("The Bear"), Hemmingway ("Big Two Hearted River") and Cather ("Neighbor Rosicky"). In addition, students read two novels, Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, representing my own region, Appalachia, and Power, by Linda Hogan, for the Florida Everglades.

This approach allowed me to organize a good deal of material in a different fashion from the chronological format of the standard literary history. It also allowed me to present the U.S. as something other than monolithic. Instead, students could understand our geographic diversity in addition to our literary and cultural ones to gain an understanding of a particular rather than "national geography," as Barry Lopez describes in "The American Geographies." Not until Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did the nineteenth-century class move from the coast, near the end of the semester. Since Slovenia is about the size of New Jersey (with about one quarter of the population), to many Slovenes the U.S. is too big and to vast to know. I gave the students a copy of a standard Rand MeNally notebook map of the U.S. Each week, we could be sure to locate the region and our texts on it. Breaking up the country this way allowed students to better understand distinct American places, and, through the literature, the events that took place there. In a final reflection essay, one student commented that each piece of work helped to create a general picture of America. "This picture is of course only part of a larger mosaic, but the works certainly widened my knowledge about this mysterious country."

Reading works from the same region also led to some understanding of the reciprocal relationships between authors and their respective regions. The voices of Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy could be as prickly as a Southwest cactus, while those of Wendell Berry and Scott Russell Sanders were gentle, roiling, like Midwestern hills. It also made for some interesting moments of intertextuality: Both Willa Cather's "Neighbor Rosicky" and Louise Erdrich's "Line of Credit" are set on the Great Plains but they tell drastically different stories about it. Nature, in this approach, is not just a stage upon which American (literary) history unfolds, but an agent in cultural identity.

Justification for American Environmental Literature

Though perhaps not what my department originally had in mind when they asked me to teach "twentieth-century literature," I justified the course on a number of levels: 1) It would allow us to sample an important literary genre, one of the most vital in America today; 2) We would be reading essays, useful models for the students' own writing; 3) Many of the non-fiction works are short, easily digestible for non-native speakers, and easy to share and photocopy with the dearth of books (though the students were remarkably good about sharing materials); 4) Nature is something that we all share, or do we? What respective attitudes, culture, and language do we bring to non-human nature? And 5) Worldwide ecological problems promise to become more pressing with each passing year, and we need to address these in the humanities as well as the natural sciences (interdisciplinarity, from my experience, hasn't flourished yet in Slovenia). Furthermore, I thought a course on the literature of place would be well received in Slovenia, which travel guides bill as the "green heart of Europe." Slovenians proudly point out that a little more than half of Slovenian landscape is covered in trees, behind only Finland and Norway in the amount of forested land (among European countries). I also thought that a course on the literature of place would extend the Fulbright vision of seeing from other perspectives to include seeing from the perspective of non-human nature. By exploring the bioregions of the U.S, I hoped that students would become not only more engaged and committed to their own diverse environments but to the planet we all share: peace through shared stewardship.

Another goal I had was to increase their sense as actants and observers in the world around them. Each week, for each region, I had them write directed response papers, based on questions I posted on the interact with links to interact resources; for example, a site on the flora and fauna of the Great Plains or one on Devil's Tower, a subject of N. Scott Momaday's "A Way to Rainy Mountain." In doing this, I was up against the institution of both the exam and the lecture, the modes of assessment and delivery at my host institution. Despite requiring a response each week, many of the students waited until the very last day, exam week, to hand them in. Rather than fostering certain skills and habits of mind--observation, critical thinking--many of my students seemed to come to the university to be told what to say about a particular text. In using a bioregional approach, a decentralized metaphor (based as it is on the watershed), I was simply hoping to provide the contexts where their own ideas might take shape.

Slovenian Students and Place

By and large, and I found Slovenian students receptive to the course, as they are very rooted in place and region. They reported being "pleasantly surprised" that the writers were "speaking my thoughts." Though a small country, Slovenia has several distinct regions, each with different dialects, and people are still identified by the region they are from. To learn more about their own attitudes and places, I had them write a beginning reflection essay using Barry Lopez's "The American Geographies" and John Daniels's "A Word in Favor of Rootlessness" to help them think even more deeply about an encounter they have had with a place, either past or present, to map it in words. They wrote descriptively about their ties to the land and their villages. The Slovenian word for place, kraj, can roughly be translated as "little town."

They most often described themselves as "nesters," though they related to Daniels's argument that small places can be narrow-minded, homogenous. Still, since building and owning a house was difficult under communism (even buying a house is out of reach for many today), once a Slovenian family found themselves in a house, they tended to stay. Also, under communism, they weren't allowed to cross borders, so few students could identify with the wanderlust famous in American literature and that Daniels describes. Today, more young people desire to travel and see new places but the language barrier is also an issue. North Americans are used to driving vast distances to the east or west, north and south, but if the Slovenians did the same, they would find themselves in a completely different culture and language. At least one student in the class saw this attachment to place as backward: "When Slovenes enter the EU, they will be expected to be more mobile. In order to be successful, some may have to find jobs outside of Slovenia. Attachment to one's land will, in a way, become a sign of a long gone feudalism." The word feud, he reminded me, is related to feudalism.

Intercultural Reflection on Nature

More than Americans, the built environment influences Slovenians' attachments to place. In their beginning reflection essays, there was almost always a church or other cultural landmark that signaled that they were home. One student wrote about the rumble of a wooden bridge that takes her to her house, and another about a small basin, made of mortar, in which the women used to wash clothes. Nearby was a small fish hatchery, an old saw mill, and what used to be an iron foundry. The deep history, the theater of cultural memory, is part of what gives each place an added importance.

In Slovenia, there is little of what Americans would call "wilderness." Countryside and city, outback and settlement are not exclusive but mutually dependent on one another. The Slovenian view of nature, and much of the European view, in my opinion, is something closer to the "garden" than wilderness (Cronon 494). Indeed, traveling by train or car, one sees that almost every home has some patch of ground that the owners cultivate. The students commented on the fact that "parks" did not seem to count as worthy subjects for writing, at least as they viewed a park in the Olmsteadian sense of one (a natural yet cultivated enclave co-existing with the urban environment). For many Americans, parks, our national ones for example, are co-existent with the notion of wilderness. They commented on the spiritual aspects of nature, and that many writers liked to go to the woods to be by themselves (and furthermore, that they had to drive a great distance). "I guess for Americans going into the woods is trying to find yourself and explore your spirituality, while for Slovenians a walk in the woods is more of a social event where you get some fresh air and chat with your companions." The main difference, another student writes, is that Americans "go to nature deliberately. We usually do not 'go to nature,' because we already have it in sufficient supply." The one Austrian student I had echoed this sentiment. "In Austria, you find nature everywhere, even in big cities (big for Austrian proportions). There are woods, lakes, green hills everywhere. Nature is not something celebrated as special; it is too much a part of our lives and therefore not paid much extra attention to."

Lack of Slovenian Nature Writing

Many of the students felt that "nature is not celebrated as special"; a cause for the reason there is little tradition of environmental literature in Slovenia. They noted too that descriptions of nature in their national literature tended to serve a more utilitarian purpose, describing rural life and telling how to cope with storms, floods, droughts. But they also noted the country's complex history of land and land ownership. "We have belonged to other countries, known as a nation of 'slaves,' a nation of the inferior persons. Perhaps this is what prepared us to finally stand up and fight for our own state thirteen years ago" (In 1991, Slovenia declared Independence from Yugoslavia). More than being concerned with a threatened natural environment, Slovenes are concerned with threats to their language and culture. "America, on the other hand, was formed out of many nations. People came looking for a better place. Environmental literature is, in my opinion, a reflection of that desire to crate a better place." One student wrote that "after reading the texts in American literature, I believe that my country also needs this kind of writing, or more of it." And another comment: "I do know that some modern Slovene authors write essays about nature and 1 am motivated to read them now that I have realized the importance of nature writing from reading the American texts."

Nature Writing In a Time of War

During the time we were reading and discussing the course texts, bombs were falling on Iraq and North Korea announced its plans to re-start its nuclear weapons program. On the day I assigned a final reflection essay, I read that fish populations worldwide were in serious decline (Revkin 1). So I asked my students what relevance environmental literature can have in our present age when we read so much bad news about our environmental predicament. What can it accomplish? The writers themselves provided some answers to this. I kept my course schedule online and I was able to supplement the readings with essays from Orion Online. They could download John Daniels's "When Words Fail" about the obscuring of language and purpose post 9/11, Wendell Berry's "A Citizens Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States," about the destruction we do to ourselves during war, David James Duncan's "When Compassion Becomes Dissent," about how the teaching of writing and literature can be seen as a revolutionary act, and Barbara Kingsolver's "Small Wonder," one of best pieces about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These online, ongoing essays coincided with printed essays in the text and the students could see the connections between these authors' concerns for the environment with a desire to protect it and promote peace. Furthermore, the online essays offered a perspective the students were not hearing on the news about official U.S. policy. "I started to perceive America from a different point of view. It was not only the country of George Bush and his bombing the terrorists, but a country that was also fragile, sometimes wild, very heterogeneous and beautiful."

They found that environmental literature served two purposes: "On the one hand it documents the calamities and forecasts the catastrophes; on the other, it offers hope, an ideal way of living." In the tradition of Thoreau, it is both jeremiad and rhapsody, throwing water on our face but carrying us away. Another student added that it "offers an opportunity to waken people up by describing the polluted, destroyed and neglected nature on the one hand, and by showing them the beauty, balance and respect for nature on the other." Yet another comments that "Nature writing can really do a lot to help us understand our destructive history and show us the right direction to heal by working with and not against nature." Students were most impressed with how Terry Tempest Williams encouraged them to "step out of line and take charge of our future," how a pen and a pad of paper could be weapons, and how she made them understand that in harming nature we are harming ourselves. With Rick Bass, they found that they were being "given another chance, an opportunity to demonstrate our ability to change." Still, not all shared this view, and one student wrote about "a list of voices who sing but make no sound" in that no one hears or reads environmental literature, or at least the people who need to (politicians). "Do you really believe that the beauty of art which glorifies nature is a solution? I am not so optimistic about this matter."

Yes, I do. The most important purpose of environmental literature is to make us think more cogently about our ethical responsibilities regarding environmental issues, to teach us that it is important for people to develop an understanding of the earth and its life forms. In using a bioregional method of organization, students should learn how environmental influences can influence the creative imagination. Alternatively, they should also learn how the power of those works can redirect thinking about the environment, what it is and what it might be. In "Buckeye," for example, Scott Russell Sanders taught them that Ohio, though not pictured on postcards or valued in our usual aesthetic categories, is a place to be valued. Ultimately, students everywhere should learn that though the source of nature is exhaustible, the source of nature writing, the imaginative response to the diverse bioregions but one world we share is not.

Works Cited

Anderson, Lorraine, John P. O'Grady, and Scott Slovic, eds. Literature and Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture. New York: Longman, 1998.

Berry, Wendell. "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the U.S." Orion Online. March/April 2003. <http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-20m/Berry.html> (22 August 2003).

Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature." The Great New Wilderness Debate. Eds. J. Baird Callicot and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. 471-499.

Daniels, John. "When Words Fail: Writers and the Clearing of Cuttlefish Ink." Orion Online. <http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Daniel.html> (22 August 2003).

Duncan, David James. "When Compassion Becomes Dissent." Orion Online. January February 2003. <http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/ om/03-10m/Duncan.html> (22 August 2003).

Finch, Robert and John Elder, eds. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: Norton, 2002.

Kingsolver, Barbara. "Small Wonder." Orion Online. <http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/02-30m/Kingsolver.html> (22 August 2003).

Revkin, Andrew C. "Fishing Depletes Oceans of Predators." International Herald Tribune. May 15, 2003. <http://www.iht.com/articles/96418.html> (22 August 2003).

Rick Van Noy, Radford University, VA

Rick Van Noy is an assistant professor of English. During the spring of 2003, he was a Fulbright lecturer in Slovenia. He is the author of Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place, (U of Nevada Press, 2003).