http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild Course Blog for the V1 Seminar, WS 08-09 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:18:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, who do you think got it right? Is our conception of nature -- as a special, redemptive place apart from human civilization, a space endowed with "spiritual" qualities that restores the individual -- now dead? Because man has so fundamentally altered weather patterns even for the most distant mountain peak, ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/02/16/bill-mckibben-vs-william-cronon-the-ultimate-showdown/ Last October, as our semester was just getting started, Matthiessen's iconic Snow Leopard celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. It has remained a popular book, often in reprint, and the particular version that appears in the Reader is taken from a new Penguin edition that was made in honor of this 30th ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/29/peter-matthiessen-open-thread/ http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/26/jewett-lecture-tomorrow-tuesday-260109/ Hi bloggers / students - Well, if you were like me, despite rushing out of the seminar early to get to a television that would be broadcasting Obama's inauguration, I nonetheless missed a large chunk of the speech. Although there is no way to connect to the elecricity of that particular ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/21/obama-the-first-black-and-green-president/ What Am I Bid for the American Wild? by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective. www.truthout.org Bryce National Park in Utah. (Photo: Ron Niebrugge) Check out Michael Winships acerbic expose on what the Bush administration is doing to American national wilderness areas in the last days before ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/11/selling-the-wild-the-great-american-wilderness-auction/ "I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular...but I might learn something ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/10/annie-dillard-open-thread/ Open space for comments / reflections / observations on Jewett and Austin. There's been substantial posts on the blog already as to do the gendering of American landscape, a space that was virgin, pliant, female, etc.--we have finally come to two women writers who--especially in the case of Jewett--deliberately ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2009/01/05/s-o-jewett-and-mary-austin-open-thread/ On a different subject of Thoreau's Walden: I was most fascinated by Thoreau's opinion about education in the sense of theoretical schooling. He seems to consider the common approach of the educational establishments to be heavily flawed. By training an individual only theoretically, the student would not be able to ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2008/12/16/h-d-thoreau-and-education/ I would like to discuss Thoreau's approach to modern improvements and civilization in the chapter "Economy". As we discussed in class, Thoreau seems to have a natural resistance against any kind of technological progress. He denounces the idea of faster communication in his statement abut the railroad and the telegraph. ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2008/12/04/thoreaus-walden-economy/ We've mentioned more than once in our conversations how the development of an American sense of wilderness and the wild in various literary and artistic forms, from poetry to paintings, was greatly affected by the western tradition of the pastoral. The contemporary writer Toni Morrison's most recent novel also dialogues with ... http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/zuber-wild/2008/12/02/toni-morrison-and-the-american-pastoral/