The Gathering of Form: Forests, Gardens and Legacies in Robert Pogue Harrison

Abstract

To critics working on the resonance of environmental issues in culture and literature, the work of Robert Pogue Harrison is an invaluable resource. Originally trained as a scholar of Italian literature, he quickly branched out into different directions, writing a broad study on the role of forests in the Western imagination, entitled Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Published in 1992, Harrison’s seminal work effectively helped to inaugurate the field of ecocriticism. In his second well-known study, The Dominion of the Dead of 2003, he explored the various ways in which our dead ancestors continue to inhabit the world of culture. Although the focus shifted from ecology to memory in this work, the ecological dimension did not disappear, as its concern for the earth demonstrated. Harrison’s last book reflected on the place of gardens in human existence. Turning to the realm between wilderness and civilisation, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition of 2008 identified various types of gardens in literature and history. Despite their disparate subjects, these three studies clearly form a united body of work. In these books, first of all, Harrison develops a ‘unique style of dealing with some classic issues of philosophical existentialism, among them the importance of space, of the earth and of the dead for human life’. He pays special attention to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, practicing a revisionist Heideggerianism that ultimately seems closer to the legacy of humanism than to the legacy of deconstruction, some deconstructionist features notwithstanding. Although this philosophical background helps to unite the three studies under consideration, I will not unravel the complex relationship