Abstract
Desire and the Desert : In Praise of the Great American Desert. This paper aims to explore the status of the American desert in its relation to the continent. The last historical, geographical and cultural frontier, the Great American Desert, attracts and repels, giving birth to metaphorical constructions that reflect the fundamental ambiguity which has been the trademark of collective representations of the American land since Elizabethan days. These historical fantasies about the wilderness of the New World are echoed by the phantasmagoria of the American West, the visionary landscapes which hold the desert wanderers spell-bound. Among them, two prisoners of the same obsession : J. Van Dyke and E. Abbey. Van Dyke in The Desert, at once a study in natural history and an aesthetic meditation, and Abbey in Desert Solitaire, part autobiography and part polemical essay, pursue an identical quest for an impossible object of desire, sharing the same passion which they transform into a love lyric, a poetic rhapsody.
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