Welcome to ENGL 315

In the nineteenth century, many geographers imagined an “Open Polar Sea,” one that would render travel from North America to Asia a matter of weeks instead of months. Today, the shrinking polar ice cap may one day shrink to nothing, making that chimerical idea a reality. In the era that stretches from then to now, humans have finally, slowly, begun to be cognizant of their peril, aware of their own role in increasing it, and desirous of finding ways to forestall the heating of the globe before it reaches a crisis point.

This course will trace the history of that dawning consciousness through to its present discourses, from the fever dreams of exploring the icy depths of the pole to the prospect of their complete and utter disappearance. We’ll begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in many ways a multi-pronged prophecy of all that could go wrong: it opens with the fictional Captain Walton’s mad quest for the Open Polar Sea, and the second madman he encounters there, Victor Frankenstein. Rarely has the issue of polar climate coincided so neatly with the risky prospect of somehow engineering a new form of life. From there, we’ll turn closer to home, considering the experiment and thought of Henry David Thoreau in his cabin on Walden Pond. This will bring around to the confluence of ecological and cultural history, with Jonathan Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. We’ll next look at the role that pollution and environmental toxins have played, reading Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring as we examine its lasting influence.

Further cultural confluences will follow, as with Dorothy Eber’s When the Whalers Were Up North we’ll find out how Portuguese whalers from New Bedford and the Inuit people of Cumberland Sound found strange common purpose. The geopolitical crises that have shaped the recent Arctic landscape will follow Banerjee’s Arctic Voices, alongside the work of selected indigenous filmmakers, and we’ll conclude with the appropriately apocalyptic Canticle for Liebowitz. Throughout, our readings will be tied to sections from Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism, which will provide a large part of the critical context for our undertaking, along with selected readings linked here on our blog.