M1 – Approfondissement littérature et civilisation américaines

Devoir maison à rendre pour le vendredi 27 avril à l’adresse suivante :

sophie.chapuis@univ-st-etienne.fr

Pour rappel, le plagiat et la fraude sont des fautes graves et passibles de sanctions disciplinaires
comme l’indique l’article 9 du règlement général de l’UJM :
https://www.univ-st-etienne.fr/fr/formation/reglement-general-des-etudes.html Vous vous engagez à
remettre un travail individuel. La communication entre vous est strictement interdite.
5
CHOISIR l’un des deux sujets ci-dessous.

SUJET 1 de type CAPES

Notion : Sauver la planète, penser les futurs possibles
10 Compare and contrast the following documents. Number of words should be between
3000/3300 maximum.

Document A : Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854

15 The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I
usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link.
The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an
old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so
I am. I too would fain be a trackrepairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
20 The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the
scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city
merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the
other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to
the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries,
25 country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he
can say them nay. And here’s your pay for them! Screams the countryman’s whistle; timber
like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs
enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and
lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are
30 stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes
the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down
goes the wit that writes them. When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion,—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity
and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a
35 returning curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver
wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
masses to the light,—as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take
the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with
his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
40 nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I
don’t know,) it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it
seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over
the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent to men as that which floats
 over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany
45 men on their errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun,
which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and
higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and
casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which
50 hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this
winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed.
Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the
enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes,
and with the giant plough, plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the
55 cars, like a following drillbarrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the
country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master
may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote
glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall
only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or
60 perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day,
that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied!
 Document B : Edward Abbey, Désert solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness, 1968.

This being the case, why is the Park Service generally so anxious to accommodate that other
65 crowd, the indolent millions born on wheels and suckled on gasoline, who expect and demand
paved highways to lead them in comfort, ease and safety into every nook and corner of the
national parks? For the answer to that we must consider the character of what I call Industrial
Tourism and the quality of the mechanized tourists – the Wheelchair Explorers – who are at
once the consumers, the raw material and the victims of Industrial Tourism. Industrial
70 Tourism is a big business. It means money. It includes the motel and restaurant owners, the
gasoline retailers, the oil corporations, the road-building contractors, the heavy equipment
manufacturers, the state and federal engineering agencies and the sovereign, all-powerful
automotive industry. These various interests are well organized, command more wealth than
most modern nations, and are represented in Congress with a strength far greater than is
75 justified in any constitutional or democratic sense. (Modern politics is expensive – power
follows money.) Through Congress the tourism industry can bring enormous pressure to bear
upon such a slender reed in the executive branch as the poor old Park Service, a pressure
which is also exerted on every other possible level – local, state, regional – and through
advertising and the well-established habits of a wasteful nation. When a new national park,
80 national monument, national seashore, or whatever it may be called is set up, the various
forces of Industrial Tourism, on all levels, immediately expect action – meaning specifically a
road-building program. Where trails or primitive dirt roads already exist, the Industry expects
– it hardly needs to ask – that these be developed into modern paved highways. On the local
level, for example, the first thing that the superintendent of a new park can anticipate being
85 asked, when he attends his first meeting of the area’s Chamber of Commerce, is not ‘Will
roads be built?’ but rather ‘When does construction begin?’ and ‘Why the delay?’
Accustomed to this sort of relentless pressure since its founding, it is little wonder that the
Park Service, through a process of natural selection, has tended to evolve a type of
administration which, far from resisting such pressure, has usually been more than willing to
90 accommodate it, even to encourage it. Not from any peculiar moral weakness but simply
because such well-adapted administrators are themselves believers in a policy of economic
development. ‘Resource management’ is the current term. Old foot trails may be neglected,
back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services
inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for
95 asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and
bigger paved roads, anywhere – particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely
popular with the petroleum industry – they bring the motorist right back to the same gas
station from which he started. Great though it is, however, the power of the tourist business
would not in itself be sufficient to shape Park Service policy. To all accusations of excessive
100 development the administrators can reply, as they will if pressed hard enough, that they are
giving the public what it wants, that their primary duty is to serve the public not preserve the
wilds. ‘Parks are for people’ is the public-relations slogan, which decoded means that the
parks are for people-in-automobiles. Behind the slogan is the assumption that the majority of
Americans, exactly like the managers of the tourist industry, expect and demand to see their
105 national parks from the comfort, security, and convenience of their automobiles. Is this
assumption correct? Perhaps. Does that justify the continued and increasing erosion of the
parks? It does not. Which brings me to the final aspect of the problem of Industrial Tourism:
 the Industrial Tourists themselves. Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the
chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing
110 themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the
treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of those urban-
suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while. How to
pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized
wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again?
115 This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which
it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit. Wilderness
preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming
pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely
industrialized, ever more crowded environment.
120 Document C : Vintage Santa Fe System Lines Ad - 1946

125
 SUJET 2 de type dissertation
130

Drawing on material from the class and your own research, write an essay discussing the
following quote.

135 “There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the
culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the
most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the
history from which it sprang.” William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995).
140
Your essay should be organized, supported by precise examples. Number of words should be
between 3000/3300 maximum.