Students are expected to complete readings and summaries PRIOR to our actual class meeting by noon each Wednesday in preparation for weekly discussions. Reading summaries or responses to discussion questions, lectures, screenings, etc. will be posted on the course blog under Course Docs in Weekly Readings.

Required course reader:

  • Honors 413 Section 02 course reader (Stringfellow)

Recommended Books (required for graduate students enrolled in this course):

  • Lucy R. Lippard, Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, The New Press, 1997
  • Lucy R. Lippard, On Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place, The New Press, 1992
  • Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, Phaidon, 2010

Suggested Reading (no particular order):

  • Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, both by Edward Abbey
  • Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson; A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time; Discovering the Vernacular Landscape; The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics; all by John Brinckerhoff Jackson.
  • Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
  • William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (W. W. Norton, 1995, 69-90).
  • Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 1993.
  • Catrin Gersdorf, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America, Spatial Practices, 2008.
  • Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 and Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008, both by Kim Stringfellow.
  • William deBuys and Joan Meyers, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, 2001.
  • Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, University of California Press, 1999.
  • Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, 2002.
  • Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, University of Georgia Press, 2001.
  • Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Heaven: Landscapes for Politics, University of California Press, 2007.
  • Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin, 2001.
  • Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place, The New Press, 2000.
  • Lucy Lippard, Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, The New Press, 1997.
  • Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert, Land Arts of the American West, University of Texas Press, 2009.
  • Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, 1972.
  • Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, University of California Press, 1996.
  • Mark Dion, Phaidon Press, 1997.
  • Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press, 1987.
  • Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simmons, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, 2008.
  • Land & Environmental Art (Themes & Movements), Phaidon Press, 2010.
  • Nato Thompson, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, 2009.
  • An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #6), edited by Lex Bhagat and Lize Mogel (2008)
  • Desert America: Territory of Paradox, Michael Kuba et al (Actar).
  • Reading Sand, The Void, the Grid, & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin (2000), The Black Rock Desert (2002, with photos by Mark Klett), and Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (2002), all by William L. Fox.
  • Phil Garlington, Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead, Loompanics, 2003.