Natural sciences “(Un)Mapping the Wild”

LRC 21, Beirut campus

This lecture, entitled “(Un)Mapping the Wild: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Thoreau’s Walden, and the Textuality of Wilderness,” will be given by Prof. Amy Clary, assistant professor at the English Department of the American University of Beirut. It is organized within the context of the ecology and environmental science courses at LAU.

Summary:
Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction best-seller Into the Wild celebrates Chris McCandless, a young man who walked alone and mapless into interior Alaska’s rugged terrain and starved to death there inside an abandoned bus. While criticism of Chris McCandless usually centers on his refusal to carry a map with him when he “walk[ed] into the wild,” Dr. Amy Clary argues that his Alaskan journey was in fact already mapped by the books that informed his actions, such as Thoreau’s Walden.

Biography:
Dr. Amy Clary is an assistant professor of English at the American University of Beirut. Her research examines the role of wilderness in American literary history. Her work on wilderness has appeared in Works and Days, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and the University of Paris-Sorbonne’s series Frontières.

Event organizer: LAU School of Arts and Sciences – Department of Natural Sciences