ENVI 318
The American Pastoral Mode Spring 2010
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ARTH 318
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

An inquiry into a nation’s largest land use, (once?) dominated by domesticated cattle and sheep grazing, often on a middle ground between arable (or urban?) lowlands and upland forests. In the East a land use in decline as animal husbandry is instead practiced intensively in factory farms. The expression of an arguable pastoralism by artists like Catlin, Cropsey, Butcher, O’Keefe, Adams, Plowden, and Nelson, by writers like Jefferson, Burroughs, T. Roosevelt, Sandoz, Athearn, and by historians or natural resource thinkers like Powell, Webb, Malin, Weaver, Calef, Limerick, and Carlson–with considerations, inter alia, of aridity, scale, transhumance, settlement diffusion, recalcitrance in terrain, the era of “open range” as a golden age, the aesthetics of breeds (as revealed in animal portraiture and breeding association standards of conformance), the rise of the disciplines of range and wildlife management, or applied science. Objects to be scrutinized, both visually and evolutionally, will include the cowboy, the ranchstead, corrals, barbed wire and fencing laws, gates, trails, windmills and other rangeland water developments (including their attendant “sacrifice areas”), government allotments, corrals, the impress of livestock trails and selected plant and animal species, both wild and domesticated, both wanted and unwanted. Some consideration of pastoral attributes in contemporary culture, as in suburban site design, Hollywood westerns, informal, one-storey dwellings, the ownership of pets, fashion or costumery.
The Class: Format: morning seminar sessions, afternoon field or screening sessions
Limit: 11
Expected: 11
Class#: 3539
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly 4-page essays on ten assigned topics, and two unassigned, all to be published as class documents; occasional note-takings; four papers totaling approximately 20-25 pages of writing
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: none other than a slight preference to those who have taken ArtH 201
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTH 318 Division I ENVI 318 Division I
Attributes: ENVI Humanities, Arts + Social Science Electives

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