WiSe 22/23: Visions of the Country: From Pastoral to Ecocriticism
Stephan Karschay
Additional information / Pre-requisites
Comments
The term ‘pastoral’ derives from classical literature and is commonly used to describe literary texts that deal with the beauties of the natural world and frequently focus on the lives of shepherds (pastor in Latin) and nymphs. Originating in the Hellenistic period with Theocritus’s Idylls (third century BC) and popularised by the Roman poet Virgil, this mode of writing spread throughout Europe in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance and came to be almost synonymous with the notions of prelapsarian peace and escapism. Yet pastoral representations of nature have always implicitly gestured beyond themselves to reflect human and natural predicaments and express social, political and religious criticism. In other words, pastoral always has an ulterior motive. Often, pastoral’s nostalgic perspective on a lost ‘Golden Age’ reveals itself to be a cry for radical change that still lies in the future. Thus, pastoral literature and art can reveal several, apparently contradictory, orientations in terms of time: it can hanker after a glorious past (elegiac mode), rejoice at a bountiful present (idyllic mode) or anticipate an improved future (utopian mode). From an ecocritical perspective, the pastoral lends itself to reconfigurations of the relationship between us and the non-human (or better: more-than-human) world, and this seminar is also conceived as a first introduction to the theory and practice of ecocriticism.
Even though the genre has somewhat declined in popularity since the beginning of the twentieth century, pastoral as a cultural and literary strategy has proved to be remarkably resilient and malleable. In this seminar we will look at a broad range of different genres and media – from the pastoral’s origins in Graeco-Roman literature and its heyday in Renaissance poetry and drama, to the ingenious uses of pastoral in contemporary British art, literature and advertising. We will specifically look at the pastoral’s inherent spatial opposition (town versus country) and its triple distinction of time (past versus present versus future) to appreciate the modifications the genre has undergone over the centuries. In seminar discussions and group presentations, students will engage with a large variety of literary and non-literary texts, paintings, photographs, performances, as well as film and television.
closeSuggested reading
Die behandelten Primärtexte werden in der ersten Seminarsitzung vorgestellt.
Zur Einführung geeignet: Garrard, Greg. “Pastoral”, in G. G., ed., Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), 33–58.
Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral”, in Louise Westling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17–30.
Rigby, Kate. “Ecocriticism”, in Julian Wolfreys, ed., Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 122–54.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments