Abstract
The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. P. Lovecraft. Adopting a perspective of changing “scopic regimes” – conventions of visual perception presented in a number of literary and non-literary works, the author analyzed a passage from Bartram’s Travels to reveal a combination of the discourse of science with that of the British aesthetics of gardening. In Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1843) the main factor is the work of imagination dissatisfied with the actual view of Niagara Falls, while in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature substantial subjectivity is reduced to pure seeing. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” the subject confronts nature that is no longer transparent and turns out meaningless. In American literature of horror from Charles Brockden Brown through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s eye encounters the inhuman gaze of a predator, a dehumanized victim of murder, or a sinister creature from the out-er space. To conclude, the human gaze was gradually losing its ability to frame or penetrate nature, bound to confront the annihilating evil eye from which there was usually no escape.
Highlights
The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H
Expelled in 1750 from his Northampton parish for verbally harassing the meeting house audience to live in the woods fifty miles west and bring spiritual care to Indians, he started penning his last, unfinished work, edited two hundred years later by Perry Miller under the title Images or Shadows of Divine Things. This rather traditional allegorical Puritan reading of the “wilderness” ends with a somewhat surprising brief expression of praise of nature almost “as is”, called “The Beauty of the World”: It is very probable that [the] wonderful suitableness of green for the grass and plants, the blues of the skie, the white of the clouds, the colours of flowers, consists in a complicated proportion that these colours make one with another, either in their magnitude of the rays, the number of vibrations that are caused in the atmosphere, or some other way
Edwards remained a staunch Calvinist till the end of his days in 1758, yet as a reader of Locke he combined a theologian’s diction with a new, empiricist discourse of the senses that eventually brought him to the sheer joy of seeing, hearing, and smelling
Summary
The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. Keywords eye, seeing, gaze, scopic regime, nature, subjectivity
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
