University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Reading the Willey Disaster: An Evolutionary Approach to Environmental Aesthetics in Cole's Notch of the White Mountains and Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest"
Get PDFInspired by the Willey Disaster of 1826, a landslide in the White Mountains that killed an entire family living in Crawford Notch, both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Cole produced works of art commemorating the event. Hawthorne’s story “The Ambitious Guest” and Cole’s painting The Notch of the White Mountains are usually read in light of their cultural significance, most often as contributions to a nationalist aesthetic that sought to celebrate American landscapes—and the history and legends associated with them—as the basis for distinctly American art forms. But applying ideas about the evolutionary basis for environmental preferences, as described in articles by Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen and Stephen Kaplan, gives us a different way to account for the lasting appeal of these classic works of landscape art and environmental literature. Recognizing the importance of habitat selection to any species, Orians and Heerwagen outline the “savanna hypothesis,” “prospect-refuge theory,” and the temporal and spatial frames of reference as they account for our intuitive and subconscious preference for certain landscapes. Kaplan describes a four-part “preference model,” discussing the appeals of coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery in determining our landscape preferences. Together, their analyses demonstrate why we are drawn to landscapes which offer both access to resources and protection from predators, which allow us to see without being seen, and which offer the promise of successful inhabitation. Successful artists and writers like Cole and Hawthorne know how to appeal to these innate, genetically-imprinted preferences for certain kinds of environments. Landscape art, then, in all its forms, succeeds not only by invoking cultural themes and influences but by appealing to human nature
“Warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!”: A Queer Ecological Reading of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man
Get PDFIn Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, George, the novel’s main character, acts a barometer for the ecological destruction enacted by the “breeders”—the families and their children—who surround him. While mourning the sudden death of his longtime partner, George observes the suburban heterosexual couples and their offspring as well as the rampant growth and construction and the general environmental destruction occurring in California at the time. While the novel is traditionally read as a text that empowers and normalizes a gay man in a long-term relationship, I argue that these critics are ignoring the environmental signs spread throughout the novel. George notices the urban and suburban sprawl occurring in California, and he realizes that the sprawl (and humans) will die and “the desert, which is the natural condition of this country, will return” (A Single Man 111). Isherwood specifically uses his gay character to track the inevitable apocalypse that will be brought on by breeding and reverses the paradigm of queerness as unnatural by making reproduction unnatural and inherently apocalyptic. Besides this, George constructs spaces to support his queerness as well as the preservation of natural spaces. And instead of imposing new binaries in the narrative, Isherwood includes descriptions of touch and play, primarily that between George and his student Kenny, as a means of dissolving boundaries and opening upon the possibility of naturalized same-sex eroticism
Landscapes of the New Ecological West: Writing and Seeing Beyond the Wilderness Plot
No full textThe discursive and aesthetic yoking together of two imperial ideals, “the West” and “the Wilderness,” has framed, plotted and empowered a landscape of expansion and development over the course of North American history–until recently with the advent of the new ecological west. This presentation introduces readers to contemporary landscape writers, historians and photographers who are de-framing and re-visioning the dominant view of the West through ecological art and critique
Trees, Ecophilia, & Ecophobia: A Look at Arboriculture along the Front Range Cities of Colorado
Get PDFThis essay is an ecocritical exploration of arboriculture, but it hovers within borderlands, or rather, biotones of theory (ecocriticsm) and praxis (pruning trees in an urban space), scholarly and creative non-fiction, image and text. It exposes the tension between ecophilia and ecophobia in an urban context, and moreover confronts the complex irrationality of planting trees (out of love) in the grasslands (out of an aversion to such an expansive biome). It aims to bring these ideas to the reader--and the reader to these ideas--through presenting a locus of intellectual and emotive energy
Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction. By Jim Dwyer. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010. 264 pp. Paperback $29.95
Get PDFCosmopolitics and the Radical Pastoral: A Conversation with Lawrence Buell, Hsuan Hsu, Anthony Lioi, and Paul Outka
Get PDFMark Twain in the Desert
Get PDFMark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad contrasts the populated, ruin-strewn Holy Land desert with the wild terrain of the arid American West. Twain’s text reflects the pervasive anxiety that the U.S., like Twain’s Middle East, will become wholly settled and domesticated and will thus lose its claim to religious, cultural, and political exceptionalism. The Innocents Abroad deserves consideration as a pioneering work of desert nature writing for its nuanced descriptions of the flora and fauna of Middle Eastern and U.S. deserts. The text’s preoccupation with natural landscapes suggests that for Twain, domesticating the wild American desert would be a fundamental loss to American culture
Recalling Walden: Thoreau’s Embodied Aesthetics and Australian Writings on Place
Get PDFThis essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), the article goes on to contextualize the discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. Both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau’s literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in the landscape through walking. Australian place writers including Edmund Banfield (1852-1923), Charles Barrett (1872-1959), Jack McLaren (1884-1954), Derek Robert (c. 1920-?), Barbara York Main (1929-), and Rod Giblett (1951-), explicitly or implicitly, reflect the influence of Thoreau’s embodied aesthetics
The Revenge of Swamp Thing: Wetlands, Industrial Capitalism, and the Ecological Contradiction of Great Expectations
Get PDFThis essay places Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in the context of nineteenth-century understandings of England's wetlands. By offering a new reading of a well-known novel the essay seeks to understand the ecological inflection of Dickens' work, and more broadly the Victorian novel's mediation between environmental and socio-economic history. Focusing on the marshes as a space of criminality and liminality, composed partly of land and partly of water, partially industrialized and partially "wasted," this study argues that the construction of this space and its subjects as "criminal" derives from its very resistance to being made useful and (re)productive. More broadly, the essay suggests that a perspective combining ecocriticism with cultural materialism reveals how the novel's contradictory representations of nature are intimately related to the contradictory status of these peripheral spaces under the regime of industrial capitalism