FSEM 171   Plant, Animal, Mineral: American Literature and Extractive Industry

Faculty Profile for Professor Child

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 of 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, and Rachel Carson. Students who successfully complete this seminar earn credit for ENGL 152 and can satisfy the human thought and expression areas of inquiry requirement or the confronting collective challenges liberal arts practices..

Ben Child is an associate professor in the English department. He teaches and studies American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on fiction and vernacular cultures. He has published articles on Bob Dylan, Cormac McCarthy, the Cinema Novo movement, William Faulkner, and the photographer William Eggleston.