[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

You could combine the Geary approach and the Stange approach (with possibly a dash of Evans' choices) merely by handing them a line from Pliny the Younger, "Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye."
You may thereafter be bombarded by requests for refunds, at which point you will introduce them to observational drawing, one of the standard classes for a British naval officer in the eighteenth century (I'm plucking this from memory, but I could find a reference for this claim if you wish). The class was required not only by the need to map strange shores, but also because it caused officers to look closely and to report what they saw.
The value students should find in observational drawing is not so much the beauty or other virtue that turns up in what they produce; it's in the long or slow, dispassionate or passionate investigation.
In some of the eighteenth century drawings I have in mind, you can see that cultural assumptions are hard to escape, but you can also see people coming to terms with unfamiliar hard places and rocks and customs and forms of dress, none of which tourists are likely to see when they press the button of a digital camera and move on. 

David Ritchie,
ever sketchy in
Portland, Oregon

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