A Place-Based, Environmental Reading and Writing
Area of Emphasis

Creative Writing
Literary and Cultural Studies
Composition and Rhetoric

Overview

Our human perspective on the natural world is undergoing a sea change.  Nature, once construed by Western culture as either an endlessly bountiful resource or a threat to be overcome and controlled, is now talking back.  And our survival as a species may depend on how well we listen, and respond.

We are now globally aware of climate change, pollution, a burgeoning population, and the scarcity of natural resources-such scarcity that even basic substances like water and oxygen are already, in some places, commodified.

In the future, all of us will be under increasing pressure to develop new ways of conserving, generating, valuing, and distributing resources.  We will need to imagine and invent new ways of seeing the natural world-or rediscover old and viable ones.  As educators, we will need to help our students imagine and invent, to reimagine and reinvent, to revalue, rediscover, and re-see, so that we can live more richly and responsibly in our place on the planet.

Literature, as an imaginative art that envisions/constructs worlds similar to, but never identical with reality, offers us possibilities for thinking freshly about these challenges.  Place-based analysis does not view the environment as a mere backdrop-as "setting" or "local color"-but as a central determinant of human discourse, of human culture, and of human identity.  This approach crosses the boundaries of creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and literature, linking the three areas via a shared concern.

Goals

Topo/graphia, the interdisciplinary place-based environmental literature and writing group within the Department of English, hopes to bring together writers, scholars, and students interested in writing that is aware of place in terms not only of geopolitical and cultural markers but also of vegetation, water, animals, birds, geology, topography, and ecological relationships-an eco-conscious approach.

Our goals are to connect, nourish, and make visible the place-based and ecocritical inquiry already being pursued on campus and, via this increased visibility, attract new thinkers to the field. 

Affiliated Faculty

COMPOSITION AND RHETORIC:
Robert Brooke

CREATIVE WRITING
Joy Castro

LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
Barbara DiBernard
Tom Gannon
Fran Kaye
Tom Lynch
Mary K. Stillwell

Relevant Courses Include

211A  Plains Literature (changing soon to Literature of Place)
244D  African-Caribbean Literature
254  Writing and Communities
258B  Autobiographical Writing
317  Literature and Environment
411/811  Plains Literature  (changing soon to Literature of Place)
432/832  Nature in 19th-Century American Literature
452A/852  A  Writing of Literary Non-Fiction
498/898  Place-Conscious Literary Studies: American West &     Australian Outback
933  Seminar in Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
Plus some sections of a number of other courses, including: 150, 151, and 253.  New courses are in development.

Related Programs

Environmental Studies Program
Center for Great Plains Studies 
Nebraska Writing Project