This course will explore approaches to the analysis and interpretation of cultural landscapes, focusing on the evolving significance of the landscape within American culture from the colonial period to the early 20th century. This is a looking as well as reading- and writing-intensive course. During class we will examine various types of "landscapes" and discuss how the natural world was comprehended and represented "as frontier, site, settlement, environment, view and idea" by such landscape architects as A. J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted; painters Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Georgia O'Keeffe; and photographers William Henry Jackson and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Willa Cather. |