Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape

Abstract

ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY: In Search of the Sublime Landscape. By Yi-Fu Tuan, ix and 205 pp.; ills., bibliog., index. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780299296803; $16.95, (electronic) ISBN 9780299296834. Since his arrival in North America in 1951 as a diffident graduate student, Yi-Fu Tuan has perfected a form of humanistic writing that blends congenial university don, analectual sage, and kitchen-table philosopher. Faithful readers of his string of previous books admire Professor Tuan, now past eighty, for his wide erudition, discernment of the connectivities in everything, and optimistic wisdom about the human condition in all of its contradictions. His crafted style, never preachy or condescending, has charmed thousands of readers. If Nietzsche called his readers to the bigger and the higher, Tuan, like Confucius, has suffused his thoughts with a practicality of the everyday. The title of Tuan's latest book suggests a tighter focus than most of his other works. In fact, however, his legendary eclecticism is apparent in this one too. Only 13 of 161 references are to geographers and seven of those are to himself. Four discrete chapters comprise the heart of this slender volume in duodecimo format. One is a reflection on the binaries of light vs. darkness, low vs. high culture, and brain vs. brawn. A second chapter is a meditation on mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and polar ice. Peppered with literary allusions, poems, and quotes, the reader gets little sense of the author's personal engagement with these kinds of places. Tuan's third piece is a later version of an essay on the city published in The Geographical Review in 1978. The fourth chapter discusses the human categories of aesthete, hero, and saint, using, among others, the examples of Queen Nefertiti (as the epitome of elegance), David Livingstone (intrepid in the face of adversity), and Dorothy Day (as a person of noble Christian impulses, though still not canonized). The landscape sublimity of the subtitle was relevant only to the second of those four chapters. For that matter, the geography of the title is also largely besides the point of the actual content of the book. When Tuan does specifically allude to geography, he is not believable. Two red flags go up when he opines that, since geography is about survival, it cannot be a romantic realm. But geography is not just about survival; it is also a knowledge area that focuses on places and landscapes for their own sake. More broadly, Tuan seems unaware that the struggle for existence has also been a concern. Romantic geography is a good deal more than Tuan describes. Unmentioned, for example, is that geography has had many practitioners, starting with Carl Sauer at Berkeley where Tuan did his graduate work. …