But What is There to See?: An Exploration of a Great Plains Aesthetic

Authors

• Shaunanne Tangney, Minot State University

Date of this Version

2004

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:1 (Winter 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

In the fall of 2001 I taught a beginning college composition course at Minot State University, a small state university located in the northwestern quadrant of North Dakota. It is typical of such courses to include a fair amount of reading, and one of the texts I assigned was Ian Frazier's Great Plains. The book is a travelogue that Frazier wrote while living in and traveling throughout the Great Plains. It is written in a direct and inviting style and provides insight about the very place in which the students and I were living. I thought students would take to it like the proverbial duck to water, so I was shocked when just the opposite happened. The students hated the book.