From the earliest cuneiform to ancient Greek poetry, from 18th-century muck manuals to 21st-century novels, farming has occupied the literary imagination. In this course, we will read a sampling of agricultural writing across time and cultures that reflects, as Wendell Berry writes, a “continually recurring affirmation of nature as the final judge, law-giver, and pattern-maker of and for the human use of the earth” (“The Whole Horse”). Using Berry’s essay “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World” as a touchstone, we will trace an ecological agrarian literary lineage and determine where we fit and how we continue this line. 

This study follows in the footsteps of the “Readings in Agriculture” class Wendell Berry taught when he was a college professor. As his former student Morris Grubbs describes it, the class read farming guides, poetry, and prose for instruction, pleasure, and encouragement. They took up questions about our proper relationships to each other and to nature. Likewise, we will search farming literature for useful instructions on reviving “mutually sustaining relationships between resident humans and their home places in the world of Nature” (“The Presence of Nature…” 77).  In all, we will consider how literature prepares us to reconnect natural, cultural, and agrarian landscapes.

In addition to large and small group discussion sessions, the course features distinct opportunities to interact with agrarian writers at The Berry Center’s annual Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, featuring readings by the Commonwealth’s finest writers.