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. …