Ithaca College

 On September 24, Michael Twomey (English/Dana Professor, Emeritus) gave two lectures on ecocriticism at Bethany College, a small non-sectarian liberal arts college in West Virginia.

 Twomey lectured at the invitation of the departments of Biology and Humanities. “Practicing Ecocriticism,” delivered to faculty and students from across the college, introduced the aims and practices of ecocriticism, an approach to literature and culture that examines the human relationship with the natural environment. In this lecture, Twomey also spoke about his work in environmental memory, a term that refers to how literary and cultural artifacts influence human thinking about nature by complementing, altering, and even displacing memories based on first-hand experience. “How the Forest Became the Wilderness,” delivered to a class on English literary history, focused on environmental memory specifically with regard to medieval and early modern English forests. By the year 1600, the wild and dangerous “forest of adventure” in chivalric romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contrasted starkly with the reality of England’s shrinking, heavily-restricted and domesticated royal forests. By comparison with these diminished English forests, the vast forests of North America appeared to English colonists as a wilderness that was inhabited by savages, owned by no one, far from royal policing, and therefore free to be seized, cleared, and settled.