Literature as Environmental(ist) Thought Experiment?

Delivered on March 18, 2006. Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1990. His research interests include rethinking U.S. literature in a globalizing world, discourses of literature and environment, and the theory of national fiction. He is the author, among other books, of New England Literary Culture (1986), The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001), Emerson (2003), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). Writing for an Endangered World won the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations' Cawelti Prize for the best book of 2001 in the field of American cultural studies; Emerson won the 2003 Christian Gauss and Warren-Brooks prizes for outstanding literary criticism.