This presentation is based on my experiences from teaching undergraduate classes on American literary naturalism using an animal studies approach to Jack London texts. This intersection of naturalism and animal studies is also where most of my research has been located, so these classes are good examples of research related teaching.
I teach or have taught two English courses in which naturalism has figured; first in a typical historical overview of English and American literature from the Renaissance to Modernism, in which Naturalism only got one seminar per semester. Here I found it useful to assign a short story, and “To Build a Fire” worked well despite its slow pace, because our focus was turned at least partly away from the man and his shortcomings, to the dog’s story. The students discussed things like species similarities and differences, what it means to be adapted to, or fit for, an environment or a task, and how the story problematizes animal and human agency. Thus, by focusing on the dog and his relationship to the environment, the story, and its typical naturalist features became accessible, and engaging.
The novella White Fang has been assigned in a slightly more advanced course, called American Literature and Ecocriticism. The course introduces terms like anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, and anthropocentrism, and White Fang provides examples of, and problematizes, all of these, and enables discussions of evolutionary theory, atavism and determinism vs agency, to mention just a few.
2024.
Symposium: Teaching American Literary Naturalism in the 21st century. The University of Gävle, 17-18 October 2024.