Choose one or more
1. What different views of how to go about preserving and (non-)representing nature are presented in Simon Schama's landscape and memory.
2. Describe your memory of a landscape in the US, and how it relates to what Simon Schama explains.
3. Pick a passage from John Muir's journal and analyze/ discuss it.
1. What different views of how to go about preserving and (non-)representing nature are presented in Simon Schama's landscape and memory.
ReplyDeleteSimon Schama writes about three traditions for when it comes to preserving and capturing nature in art. The first sees nature as a beautiful gift from the "creator" given to humankind, whose job it is now to protect it. The word landscape comes from the German word landscaft, which signifies "a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction." (267). Here, humans have a duty to protect the beauty of nature. The second tradition goes against this by saying that people should not dictate what is beautiful in nature, but rather appreciate what was given to them. The third group, environmental historians, criticizes mankind's involvement with nature even further. They say that idealising the beauty of nature is a lie that covers up the truth, which is that humans are destroying nature, by exploiting it. Some say the destruction began with the scientific revolution, others believe that it started sooner, with the invention of the plow and the start of the agrarian revolution.
2. When I think about landscapes I think about them being representations, and how geography has something to say about that piece of earth in many ways. A landscape is the geographic base where culture and its signifying practices of self, groups, and ‘others’ take place. Landscape provides a starting point for cultural geography, as it is a ‘human-made space in the land’, also described as cultivated ground. In that sense, when Schama quotes Muir and says how in order to protect Yosemite’s ‘spiritual potential’, that meant keeping the wilderness pure. Keeping the wilderness pure, in this sense, means that therefore we’d have to occupy it. This sounds contradictory, but in light of my first thoughts on US landscape this makes sense. Landscape is a ‘human-made space in the land’, so in order to cultivate it and reach its full potential, a piece of land should be cultivated. For it to be cultivated, it should be occupied to become a ‘product of culture’. Although it might not seem ideal to always put a human-made mark on a piece of land, as Schama puts it “while we acknowledge that the impact of humanity of the earth’s ecology has not been an unmixed blessing, neither has the long relationship between nature and culture been an unrelieved and predetermined calamity” (Schama 1996, p. 9-10)
ReplyDelete(1) In the introduction to his book “Landscape and Memory”, Simon Schama presents 3 ways of representing nature. First, nature is represented as a “moral corrective” (p. 11) to the urban life, that is, the country side and nature are an escape to city residents that need to detox from the ills of the urban scene. Then, nature is represented as good enough in its current state. Lastly, environmental historians are against the “annexation of nature by culture” (p. 12).
ReplyDelete(3) “How sweet and keen the air.” (p. 271) + “I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy” (p. 272). In the first passage, there is a humanization of nature, that is, Muir attributes human characteristics to nature (“sweet”, various elements of nature “gazing and listening with human like enthusiasm”). In the second passage, Muir animalizes humans, that is, attributes animalistic characteristics to humans (“animal joy”).
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