Interdisciplinary 101 returns for the fall term in two weeks at the EMU. We will be back in person hosting Gordon Sayre as he presents “Rare Birds and Rare Books: The Species as Work of Art”.
Professor Sayre is Head of the English department at the University of Oregon and Director of Undergraduate studies. His research interests include Early American and Native American studies.
His recent publications include The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh, and American Captivity Narratives: An Anthology.
From Professor Sayre’s words:
In this study of the leading bird artists of 18th and 19th-century America, Mark Catesby and John James Audubon, I argue that this distinction between consumption and observation, between the commodification of animal products and of animal images, is not so obvious as it seems. Natural history books constitute a continuum between bodily specimens and textual representations–some guides to grasses and mosses have been published with actual specimens mounted on their pages. Catesby’s and Audubon’s books were elite luxury products marketed as the most colorful, lifelike representations ever created, based on observations of living birds in the wild. The engravings were hand-colored and fewer than 250 complete sets of each were produced. They were sold by subscription at the cost of two guineas per issue. At the outset of his publication project in 1827 Audubon wrote in his journal of his project as “a book that in fifty years will be sold at immense prices because of its rarity.” Indeed, bibliographers have referred to The Birds of America as “an endangered book” and have tracked down every copy. It is among the most valuable books on earth.
I argue here that an economic calculus of scarcity and value structures aesthetic representations of birds in books in much the same way as it manages endangered bird populations in the wild. The Ivory-billed woodpecker, painted by both artists, has likely been extinct since the 1930s, but ornithologists and birders continue to seek it with the mania of a search for sunken pirate’s treasure. The California Condor, painted by Audubon even though he never saw it alive in its habitat near the Pacific Coast, nearly went extinct in the 1980s, and since then has become a rare species curated and protected like a work of art. Biologists captured the last wild birds and zoos and sanctuaries raised chicks by hand, then released them into carefully selected habitats. Many millions of dollars have been spent reproducing and protecting a bird that now survives in numbers similar to the extant copies of Catesby’s and Audubon’s books.
***Sponsored by the Center for Environmental Futures, the event will be in the Erb Memorial Union in the Lease-Crutcher-Lewis Room, room 23, from 10:30am-12 pm. See you there!
