Cape Cod, Fall 2011
(4.5 credits, English)
“Over the past four hundred years the Cape’s landscape and its people have probably inspired more memorable writing than any other nonurban area of comparable size,” writes Robert Finch of Cape Cod. In Exploring Cape Cod: Its Nature and Culture (ENGL 181B, 601) we will come to understand why the Cape has stirred the imaginations and talents of so many — from the indigenous people who lived there for millennia before the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620; to Thoreau, who hiked the Cape extensively; to Henry Beston, who built his “outermost house” on the Great Beach at Nauset in the 1920s; to contemporary writers and poets like Annie Dillard, Robert Finch, David Gessner, and Mary Oliver.
The reading will span the last 400 years, touching on what Cape Cod has been, what people imagine it to be, and what it might become in the future. Over the Thanksgiving break we will travel to the Cape, where we will live, work, and study for a week at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, a 1,000-acre nature preserve on Massachusetts Bay. There we will venture out to hike in the footsteps of Thoreau and Beston and take a boat to Billingsgate Shoal to learn about seals and seabirds. We will explore the marsh and help sea turtle researchers working to save stranded turtles. We will travel to historical villages and lighthouses, spend a day in historic Provincetown, and hike the famous Provincelands dunes.
