Honors Credit

Dr. Jeremy Schraffenberger, 4:00-5:50pm Mondays

*2 credit hour seminar – 1st year Presidential Scholars ONLY 

Course Description: Cultural representations and interpretations of the non-human natural world inform and are informed by the way humans understand and treat the environments they find themselves in. In this class students will read and respond to reflections and representations of the natural world, focusing on environmental values and ideas as they have been expressed in literary, popular, and critical texts. Specifically, students will explore this relationship between people and their environments in the context of the American experience, including their own personal experiences of the world around them: their hometowns, the UNI campus, the city of Cedar Falls, the state of Iowa, the Midwest region, and beyond. Students will be introduced to a range of critical approaches to environmental discourse, from ecophilosophy and eco-spirituality, to ecofeminism and environmental justice. In the end, we will all emerge from this course with a more deeply considered understanding of our own relationships to the non-human world.

Active participation is the lifeblood of this class, both orally during classroom discussions and in writing assignments. Participation requires more than simply showing up and speaking. Rather, students must first prepare to participate, coming to class having read and thought deeply about the texts and topics at hand, asking questions of the material and of themselves. By participating in this way, student will cultivate their own academic authority with rigor, confidence, and self-direction, but they will be equally rewarded by participating in the spirit of generosity, humility, curiosity, and open and honest intellectual engagement.

Professor Biography: In addition to literature and critical writing classes, I also teach creative writing here at UNI. I work under the assumption that all writing is creative and should therefore be of immediate and not just deferred value. In other words, I want the work that students do in my classes to matter. Writing need not be just about learning the rules and following the conventions of academic discourse—though we should, of course, all make ourselves aware of whatever rules and conventions we find ourselves subject to. Instead, I believe the process of writing helps us learn what we hadn’t yet realized we were thinking.

If anyone is interested, I’ve published some books of poetry, American Sad (Main Street Rag), Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan Press), and The Waxen Poor (Twelve Winters Press), and my other creative work has appeared in anthologies and journals like Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Apropos of the American Environments Seminar, I published “Our Discipline: An Ecological Creative Writing Manifesto” in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and my co-written chapter “Ecological Creative Writing” appears in the collection Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (Southern Illinois University Press). I’m proud to be editor of the North American Review, the oldest literary magazine in the United States, which is housed here at UNI, and I play piano in a local band called The Favorites.