17385

HS-Literary and Cultural Theories: From Pastoral to EcoGothic

Stephan Karschay

Kommentar

The English countryside is usually imagined in distinctly ‘pastoral’ terms. Ideas of a ‘pastoral’ landscape derive from classical literature and are found in literary texts that deal with the beauties of the natural world and often 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. Pastoral engagements and transmutations can be found throughout the history of English literature from the realist novel of the nineteenth century to the ecoGothic shocks delivered in contemporary folk horror and the plots and settings of ecologically aware crime fiction. 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.

Requirements

Regular attendance, active contributions to seminar discussions, lively participation in teamwork, a group presentation or lead in discussion group, and written course work (such as reading-response papers). Module exam: academic term paper of 4,000 words. The first weeks of the course also count towards regular attendance.

Recommended introductory reading

Boehm, Katharina & Stephan Karschay. “Introduction: Gothic Ecologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present”, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 27/2 (2020): 115–128.

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.

Set texts

William Shakespeare, As You Like It [1599], Norton, Arden or Oxford edition.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles [1891], ed. Tim Dolin, London: Penguin.

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