123232 AR Literature Course (interactive) (2015W)

In this difficult age of ours, marked by severe uncertainties and new historical upheavals, we have been witnessing a renewed enthusiasm for gardens and the practice of gardening. Garden books, garden journals, garden centers, TV and Radio garden programmes have proliferated over the past decade. Why such a fascination with gardens?

Robert Pogue Harrison explains how, in Western culture, one of the main purposes of gardens has been to provide 'sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult of history': 'History without gardens', he writes, 'would be a wasteland. A garden severed from history would be superfluous'. It is because of the destructive, uprooting and devastating effects of history that we should cultivate our garden. According to Voltaire’s most famous maxim, 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin'.

In this course, then, we will wander through a range of different gardens – mythical, literary, real (the public Volks- and Burggarten, our campus green area, but also our private, more homely gardens); we will discuss their symbolic, aesthetic, ethical, and cultural values.
We will explore the relations between gardens and art; gardens as possible artworks but also how gardens are mediated in a set of English literary texts.
Finally, we will explore the significance gardening and cultivation might have for people, the temporal horizons they rely upon, the gardener's 'vocation of care' (Harrison), the garden as 'epiphany' (David E. Cooper), and gardening as a possible example of what Michel Foucault used to call 'la culture de soi'.