Pastoraalin inversioita, 5 op

Was Marcel Proust correct when we claimed that the only true paradise is a paradise lost? Or can we get back to Eden, Arcady, Xanadu, Shangri-La, Ata? And if so, at what cost? To answer these questions, this seminar will examine the literature and criticism of the pastoral, a “species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without”, according to Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination. Our course will traverse several literary periods that make use of that equipment — Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, (post)modernist, contemporary — and track its permutations from classical eclogues through early-modern elegies and 1970s feminist science fiction to recent anti- / post-pastoral depictions of climate change and the Anthropocene. In doing so, we will explore various cultural forms (theatre, poetry, visual art, film, the novel) within a range of regions and landscapes, asking how the pastoral has been used to think about the limits of place, nation, and the modern in different historical contexts. At the core of this theme course are queries concerning nostalgia’s role in the production of nature, environment, empire, and alternative forms of political belonging.