Fall 2008 Courses English 294-03: Field, Fold, & Table: The Literature of Sustainable Agriculture (Krier ) (Literature & Environment ) T/TH 9:40-11:10am OLRI 301

What counts as sustainable creation of our food, and what do literary writers explore about farming it? This course studies writers of essays, fiction, poetry, visual arts, and song on questions of sustainable agriculture, food supply, labor, and justice. We'll look at current critical issues that concern agrarian writers: agricultural labor and laborers, community, sufficiency, dearth and abundance, with the specific purchase on these issues that literature offers. Beginning with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, we'll work back in time through farmers of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, immigrant, migrant, and pioneer farmers, builders of reform movements and utopian communities, Coyote and other tricksters and other animals, Zen monks, ancient mythological beings. Writers and artists may include Willa Cather, Henry David Thoreau, Hesiod, Virgil, Dogen, Homer, Arthur Waley, Jane Grigson, Lewis Hyde, Masanobu Fukuoka, Raymond Williams, Gary Snyder, Tim Ingold, Robert Capon, folk singers Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, photographic collections from Dust Bowl and Depression farms by Dorothea Lange and Pete Wettach; paintings and poems on agrarian motifs of ploughman, orchard and meadow, seedtime and harvest, and farm animals.

Happily, this fall-term course occurs during harvest season. We'll tour an organic farm near the Twin Cities, and take advantage of the area's rich resources in food co-ops, farmers' markets, state fair, and CSAs. We'll hear visiting speakers about food and farming. Students will research seasonal, local foods (and we'll eat them, as class members' scheduling permits).

Two essays; lots of close reading and discussion; weekly brief focus papers. We hope this course will fulfill the College Writing (W) designation, but that notification won't arrive until late August or early September.

*Cross-listed with ENVI 294-01*

Fall 2008 Course Listings