The Modern Pastoral

The pastoral has always been a way of thinking about what "nature" means once you set it against the city, the farm, or the factory, and this course tracks how that mode mutates from Virgil's eclogues through Romanticism, Victorian agrarian capitalism, and into contemporary environmental writing and film. You'll read Wordsworth, Hardy, Hughes, and Clarke alongside Muir's nature-writing and watch Tarkovsky's Stalker and Arnold's Annihilation, then work through a midterm, essay, reports, and a final that ask you to read formally and ideologically at once. It sits well after the survey courses, and it's where ecocriticism stops being a buzzword and becomes a tool you can actually use on a poem.