“Nature is an imitation of Art,” Oscar Wilde famously declared. With his provocation to recognize that nature and artifice are (despite what we might think) hardly opposed, we will explore in this seminar how the study of literature addresses this seeming paradox. How, for instance, does fiction fashion worlds that appear natural? Or, conversely, how can the tools of literary criticism be used to reveal that what we call nature is in fact highly constructed, from the marginalization of certain populations to the emergence of scientific objectivity itself? This course will impart on students interpretive skills for engaging a variety of literary works from different periods and genres—poetic, fictional, cinematic, artistic, and philosophical—and will prepare them for upper-level English and other Humanities courses. Students will be exposed to a wide array of topics: postcolonial literature, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, critical race studies, ecocriticism. We’ll read works by writers and thinkers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Baldwin, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Bishop, and J. M. Coetzee toward a new awareness of the English and Anglophone literary scene and an ability to read critically and write with clarity.