Example Posts

So here are a few example posts for you guys to peruse, and as with all good examples, these have some caveats attached to them:

1. They are not on texts we are reading for this course (this seems sort of obvious).
2. They are a bit longer than I may expect from you guys (though more is generally better -- as long as it's a polished "more") and reference more texts than you have to.
3. They link broader themes than I want you guys to write on. So, for instance, focus on particular images (like the rhetoric of the West as a space of "home" that we talked about on Monday) rather than larger themes (like "violence"), unless you can really specify what you mean by that theme (in other words, how do the texts we're reading define the terms of that theme?). However, the analytic rigor and specificity of these examples is representative of what I would expect in your posts.
4. They have questions at the end -- not a requirement, but an excellent add on that will help our class discussion if you find you have questions you'd like to pose to the class.

"Violence"
The Western landscape is no stranger to violence. Not only is there a history of ecocide and environmental degradation in the West, but nature also often seems a brutal, unforgiving force. Human on human bloodshed routinely characterizes the West in popular media as well. Ty Hardin’s quick and unfortunate end by lightening in Wyman’s High Country, the nuclear testing sites Mike Davis investigates in “Dead West: Ecocide in Malboro Country,” and Llewelyn Moss’ murder in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men represent these overt kinds of “Western” violence. Violence can also be more subtle, enacted through the avenues of economics, politics, culture, and citizenry, as Tim Cresswell studies in the sixth chapter of On the Move, “Mobility, Rights, and Citizenship in the United States.” There, he investigates how laws surrounding mobility limit citizenry, belonging, and economic and political freedom in the American West. Sharman Apt Russel discusses her personal retaliation of political disenfranchisement in her essay “Illegal Aliens,” where she admits that she routinely offers work, shelter, and food to seasonal, migratory workers from Mexico. Furthermore, these violences never stand alone; while nature finds a way to “fight back” in Sherman Alexie’s “Distances,” the American Indians in his short stories cannot fight back against the political violence they suffer at the hands of the United States government and its twisted reservation politics. How does violence both to and from the environment in literature serve to accentuate or frustrate political, social, cultural, and economic violence? Does Western American literature suggest that the West’s environment invites a violent response to its brutal temperatures, lack of natural resources, and resistance to settlement? How does literature attempt to reconcile or explain the violence humans have done unto the West’s environment?

"Agriculture and Food"
Whether or not the West enables long term survival depends largely on the availability of agricultural resources. As such, the challenge of finding and maintaining a food supply resurfaces again and again in literature that deals with long- and short-term habitation in the West. Migration makes this process especially tricky, as moving through space both expands and diversifies a food supply, bringing more (potentially harmful and helpful) variables into play. To complicate this concern further, preserving sustenance for groups of people demands a more comprehensive and complex understanding of nature’s seasonal and regrowth processes, as Wendell Berry strives to communicate in Remembering. Similar to Snyder’s networking “off the path” in order to witness the wild at its most lush and diverse in Practice of the Wild, Berry yearns to reconnect with and cultivate a nature, unblemished by the scars of mechanical farming, that offers nourishment without harmful human intervention. With a similar aim in mind, David Masumoto uses small scale mobility to his agricultural benefit in Epitaph for a Peach. In this short autobiographical narrative, Masumoto explains that he frequently walks his orchards to learn and mimic their diversity of flora and fauna. At the same time, the migratory demands of the food market impede the selling and preservation of his Sun Crest Peaches. On the other hand, as Mary Oliver and Stephen Bordio reflect, hunting (done right) both brings us in closer communication with nature and gives us unique access to animals’ perspectives as predators and prey. What other natural processes does literature use hunting and gathering to access or interrogate? How does the ability to find food speak to or comment on mobility and its success? How does literature use agricultural and hunting practices to examine what it means to create or produce responsibly across a series of networked bioregions?