English 22 intends to introduce students to the bourgeoning field of Literature and the Environment. This course specifically focuses on a branch of the environmental humanities called animal studies that is interested in investigating the relationship with humans and animal nonhumans. In particular, we will survey the entanglement of simians and humans. By examining fictional, non-fictional, filmic, and scholarly writings on simian species, we will plumb the early modern and modern relationship with monkeys, chimpanzees, apes, orangutans, and gorillas. We are centrally interested in how the literary imagination envisions contact with primates and how these relationships are entangled with mutual, not necessarily equivalent, constitution.

N.B. This course is reading and academic-writing intensive.

Authors may include: Jane Goodall, Roger Fouts, Dian Fossey, Jonathan Swift, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Karen Joy Fowler, Donna Haraway, and Mel Chen.