Writing the Natural World: from Creation Myths to Catastrophe

Harvard FAS

How do we document volcanoes, whale-song, winds, tempests? How do we write with and about the “natural world” and the place that humans occupy in it, in a moment where everything seems to be changing so rapidly. And how do we reimagine beginnings in a moment when end-of-world narratives seem so predominant?In this workshop we will be reading authors like Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, Virgil, Hesiod, and Ovid, who documented or imagined volcanic eruptions, astronomical…