Course Guide ~ LIT 260 / Human Identity and the Natural World

Imagine you have been asked to cook a dish for a Wednesday meal by your professor, who also happens to be a cheese connoisseur. The dish must include:

• pasta (an ingredient graciously provided to you by your professor)
• a blend of three cheeses
• other ingredients of your choice

Your professor has asked you to submit a list of ingredients used in your dish that includes the:

• name of the cheese
• name of the city in which the cheese was made
• name of the company responsible for producing the cheese
• date after which the cheese should not be used

Moreover, presentation matters to your professor, and she has asked you to follow a particular format in writing up your ingredient list.

Finally, you attend a school with some seemingly insatiable professors--each of whom favors ingredients other than cheese--and have been requested to cook for three of them over the course of the next week. What is the most efficient, sure-fire way to please your professor?

Compile a list of words and phrases that may be helpful for finding books and articles with information that might aid an author in describing a particular location's:

• geology
• flora
• fauna
• weather
• streetscapes

Pay particular attention to the word found in the subject headings/descriptors of the the records you find for interesting books and articles. Try this search as a starting point and go from there:

• Go to the Hamilton Library Catalog
• Enter the following words in the search box: natural history outer banks
• Limit your search to "Books" using the "Resource Type" drop-down menu
• Select a book and look at the record for it
• Choose a new phrase from the subject headings for the book (e.g., coastal ecology)
• Try a new search using the phrase you just found and adding a different locale (e.g., costal ecology cape cod)
• Repeat

What are some phrases that seemed to work for this assignment?

• natural history
• nature and civilization
• environmental literature
• geology
• land use
•