A colleague up the hall likes to start every class period with music, but I'm more inclined to kick off my literature classes with images. Scanning over my Moodle page for the semester so far, I see that I've shown my Concepts of Nature class images of paintings by Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, and Guercino, along with photos of Hemingway fishing, Gene Stratton Porter hiking, and Euell Gibbons hawking Grape-Nuts (here).
I've shown photos of chalk, flint points, Claude glasses, and fringed gentians, a gigantic hedge spelling out Dawes Arboretum, and Malcolm Cochran's sculpture Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees (here). I've shown Isabella Bird decked out in her Hawaiian riding costume and my California Lit students visiting Muir Woods in their students-on-a-trip costumes.
I've shown fantasy future cities and Thomas Kinkade cabins, and on Friday I'll show treehouses, cave dwellings, and Robinson Jeffers's Tor House and Hawk Tower, along with Sean Parker's outrageous wedding at Big Sur and Wendell Berry looking right at home in a farm field.
I suppose it would be possible to study nature in literature without photos, but the pictures take us places otherwise inaccessible to the stationary student and help me introduce concepts we'll encounter in the literature. Friday's theme is home, including Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home" with its urgent command, "You stay home too." What does it mean to be at home in nature? You'll have to come to my class to find out.
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