| Credits | 1 |
| Restrictions | No 2025 2024 Instr perm req during Drop/Add |
| Pre-Requisites | |
| Co-Requisites | |
| Core Area | |
| Area of Inquiry | Human Thought and Expression |
| Liberal Arts Practices | Confront Collective Challenges The Process of Writing |
A study of American literature that examines relationships between literary texts and the extractive industries that shape our world. The large-scale processing of organic materials has created significant costs and unevenly distributed benefits, leading to conflicts that have informed important work in imaginative literature and film. The texts explored allow for discussions about how art interprets and protests the use and misuse of natural resources, how it describes the origins and implications of climate change, and how it imagines alternative approaches to economic production, consumption, and labor. Students use a group thematically linked texts to understand fundamentals of the study literature. Figures studied include W. E. B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Katie Beaton; Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson; and Jun Yung.