Depiction Of Landscape Research Articles

Artistry of Hunger: Desire and Appetite in Desert Solitaire

A r t is t r y o f H u n g e r : D e s ir e a n d A p p e tite in D e s e r t S o l it a ir e J o y K e n n e d y Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire O The desert, according to Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, is a landscape of “consummation” and “fulfillment”: predator feeds on prey, plant growth clings tenaciously in dry crevices, and human observers must always be aware of their own survival (113). In Desert Solitaire Abbey describes literal hunger, like his ravenous pains on the cow trail with Roy Scobie, and also uses a metaphorical language of hunger to describe place and desire. Throughout his narrative, food images surface unexpectedly in depictions of landscape. Appetite and desire become intertwined in a synesthesia of awareness. Although Robert Ridges, Snake drum. His gourd art is sprinkled throughout this essay. J O Y K E N N E D Y 4 0 3 Abbey remarks that he wants to describe the desert without the bur­ dens of personification and metaphor, his best successes are by using culturally determined metaphors. Evening light colors canyon walls in hues of “honey” and “whiskey” (200). The sun sets like a “celestial pizza [pie]” (299). The love for wilderness, Abbey tells us, is “a hunger for what is always beyond reach” (190). While many critics have con­ centrated on this unique desire for landscape, very few, if any, have looked at Abbey’s food metaphors coupled with this hunger for place. These images help propel Abbey’s idea of desire for landscape. Surprisingly, they also illustrate new additions to the multiple para­ doxes of Desert Solitaire. There are three aspects of food imagery that can be observed in Desert Solitaire, and all exemplify the role of duality and paradox that Abbey establishes in the text: (1) food metaphors in descriptions of the desert, (2) appetite and desire for place, (3) Abbey’s appetite. Using such culturally determined metaphors as mashed potato clouds is the very sort of human-focused image that Abbey claimed he wanted to avoid. In the introduction he affirms, “In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy.” And later he explains, “I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree ... and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qual­ ities” (6). A reliance then on food metaphors (which often echo civi­ lization in pizza pie sunsets and hamburger rocks) illuminates the paradox of his language and representation. Expressing desire for place, Abbey uses the word “hunger.” Yet such wording leads to a paradox, for hunger signals a desire for con­ summation. Overzealous consumption of the land by industrial tourism is what Abbey warns against. Such images of eating arc also turned inward to delineate self-destruction. Abbey angrily declares that if he and Ralph Newcomb thought about the damming of the Colorado for too long, “we’d be eating our hearts,” and later he tells us that a person’s desire to romanticize a place should be “ground up, cooked,” and “consumed” (210, 273, 273). Abbey includes descriptions of what he ate and what he wanted to eat. In his details (and recipes from Down the River) his word choice varies from the crude to that of the epicurean gourmet’s, laced with smatterings of French. Such shifts and duality- in vocabulary are attached to the larger question that readers have always asked about the persona in Desert Solitaire'. Who is talking? Is it “Cactus Ed,” an invented man of appetite and gusto, or the actual Edward Abbey, the philosophical satirist? 4 0 4 WAL 3 8 . 4 W i n t e r 2 0 0 4 F o o d Me t a p h o r s in D e s c r i p t i o n s o f t h e D e s e r t In Desert Solitaire hunger and body become vivid extensions of the...

Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni'sRed Desert

The cinematic landscape provides a rich opportunity to explore cultural representations of place, space and nature. This essay focuses on the depiction of landscape in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964). Previous approaches to the critical interpretation of landscape in the cinema of Antonioni have been characterized by three principal weaknesses: a narrow emphasis on formalist and auterist lines of influence between different branches of the visual arts; an attachment to exceptionalist characterizations of the Italian cinematic landscape; and a transhistorical interpretation of existential themes such as alienation. In this essay we shall consider two neglected themes: the significance of the technological sublime for the aesthetic experience of industrial landscapes; and the impact of abstract expressionism on Antonioni's cinematic vision. We will counter simplistic categorizations of Antonioni's work by considering the complexity of the relationship between the cinematic landscape and wider developments in twentieth-century modernism. The essay concludes by locating Red Desert at a unique juncture in the development of modernist conceptions of nature and landscape.

Looking for Pieter Bruegel

This essay survey the attempts by art historians to discover the meaning of the peasant paintings and other works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and to determine whether his oeuvre reflects any underlying philosophy. It examines some of the recent literature on Bruegel dealing with the question of his political allegiance, his supposed affiliation with the circle of distinguished intellectuals in Antwerp that included the printer-publisher Christophe Plantin and the geographer Abraham Ortelius, the possible influence of Stoic ideas in his depiction of landscape, and his social ideals and attitude toward his peasant subjects. The essay suggests that there are obscurities in Bruegel's works that may never be resolved.

The Decline of the Baedeker Country: The Representation of Geographical and Cultural Identity in Pynchon's Novels

Inger H. Dalsgaard's mindful investigation of Pynchon's Spenglerian vision (97) shows how [i]n both The Decline of the West and Gravity's Rainbow, prospects of deliverance are radically constricted, concluding that [o]nly the sense that Pynchon's Rocket State is constructed from the earth as resource whereas Spengler's Faustian culture is a natural outgrowth of the earth as seedbed appears to offer room for some hope (114). This essay begins at that precise point, also combining Spengler's diagnosis with Pynchon's prose but focusing, unlike Dalsgaard, on the latter's specific geographical representations. Pynchon's landscape depictions, while they stand in obvious relation to the earth as resource/seedbed, rearticulate the crisis of modernity as they lead to ontological incertitude and epistemological dilemmas. A plenitude of historico-cultural layers lies beneath the wastelandish depictions, rendering landscape as substantially more than just contextualized scenery. Indeed, landscape in Pynchon's works figures as a sort of reflective matrix. Although much of this can well be framed with Spengler's rhetorics of decline, decay and disease, the openness and boundlessness often invoked in Pynchon's texts point at the same time to a possible loophole in the pessimistic predicament pace Spengler.

From Wilderness to Landscape: Charles Harpur's Dialogue with Wordsworth and Antipodean Nature

READ WORDSWORTH FOR HIS SIMPLE POWER, / NOT FOR HIS NAMBY-PAMBY-ness. (1) This caution was offered by largely self-educated poet Charles Harpur (1813-1868). (2) son of convict parents and a vocal opponent of all Monarchy Men and Empire-worshippers, (3) he called for increased access land and positions of influence for native-born white population, as well as for an independent national literature. Aspiring be first authentic singer of Australian colonies, he searched for empowering models, working way through greats of English prosody from Chaucer Shelley. (4) Milton appealed strongly Harpur, who was an avowed republican in every fibre of being, as did Percy Bysshe's allegiance intellectual ideals and the Social True (PW, p. 823). But it was Wordsworth who exercised most sway over poetic apprenticeship. Contemporaries were quick notice this influence--and disparage it. G. B. Barton in pioneering study Poets and Prose Writers of New South Wales (1866) depicted Harpur as a man who never developed fully gift for landscape painting, but strove instead after subtlety of and to emulate lofty flights of so that he grasped at objects placed beyond reach by while neglecting those which might have been attained with ease. (5) Subsequent commentary echoed this notion of Wordsworth's impeding effect, as in H. M. Green's monumental History of Australian Literature (1962), where it asserted that Harpur had worn thinner here and there veil that reading, tradition, custom, habit of mind had hung between new country and its white inhabitants, but that his eye might have been truer and language more appropriate if he had done wandering without a Wordsworth in pocket, or if he had put life first and books second. (6) This verdict, however, far from incontestable, and in what follows I wish clarify precise nature of Harpur's debt Wordsworth, especially as it bears on t he relation of thought landscape depiction in work, and show how Australian, not content with simple emulation, extended Wordsworth's concerns in conformity with own radical program. (7) Given background, Harpur's response Romantic poet was at once predictable and refreshingly independent. He knew that Wordsworth, by 1840s, had become defender of that Old World caste whose representatives held sway in antipodes, and he passed severe strictures on Englishman's conservative stance: Lofty and strenuous of sentiment, But narrow and partial in its scope and bent, And thence bigot of a local set Of habitudes, meshed round him like a net. Hence too intellect, though large it be By nature, hath one prime deficiency-- Of moral difference that broad view which leads steps of Thought beyond snares of creeds And circles of opinion, whether they Be of Old Time or of yesterday. Hence too narrow bias, I suspect, Even in Poesy attempt a sect. (Wordsworth, PW, p. 817) (8) Poetically, later Wordsworth belonged that group, designated by Harpur as veritably vulgar, which is abject enough begod a lord or king, (9) unlike earlier author of works like Lyrical Ballads, Peter Bell, and The White Doe, whom he was willing champion in pages of a colonial press opposed opinions of aging English ideologue. Scorning Wordsworth's final avatar as Victorian sage and poet laureate, Harpur seized on notorious levelling tendency of earlier verse. He praised Englishman's appreciation of nature, capacity invoke impressions of childhood, and celebration of commonplace: How much, O Wordsworth! in this world how much Has thy surpassing love made rich for me, Of what was once unpraized. …

Water Towers: A Study in the Cultural Geographies of Zionist Mythology

This paper examines the figuring of water towers in Zionist mythology by focusing on three symbolic functions: the iconographic, the commemorative and the nostalgic. The icono-graphic function pertains to the iconic employment of water towers in pictorial depictions of the Zionist settlement landscapes. The commemorative function refers to the transformation of particular water towers into war memorials of Israel’s War of Independence. The nostalgic function relates to the valorization of defunct water towers as elements of local heritage and material symbols of local identity. Operative in different historical periods, political contexts and cultural settings, these symbolic functions pertained to particular Zionist myths and were productive in the ongoing formation of Zionist cultural geographies of modernity, tradition, memory and nostalgia.

Atget, the pioneer

A portfolio of more than 160 photographs shedding new light on the often neglected features of Eugene Atget's work, those innovative features of his photography that were to transform the photographic medium for a modern generation. Juxtaposing Atget's works with those of later photographers, this volume reveals how deeply Atget influenced modern perceptions in his novel depictions of street scenes, industrial landscapes, shopfronts and interiors, architectural details and parks.

Schiller's Theory of Landscape Depiction

Examines the theory of landscape depiction in the works of literary writer Friedrich Schiller.

Schiller's Theory of Landscape Depiction

Schiller's Theory of Landscape Depiction

In Search of the Authentic Nation: Landscape and National Identity in Canada and Switzerland

Abstract. While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity‐forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation‐states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration.

Migrant Travellers and Tourist Idylls: The Paintings of Jack B. Yeats and Post‐colonial Identities

Travellers of various kinds have long been a salient feature of Irish society. Whether tinkers, tramps, seasonal workers or emigrants, they occupied positions outside an increasingly settled and bourgeois population. Their histories are contested and inevitably bound up with colonialism. This article considers how the figures of travellers in landscape depicted in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings of the 1930s–50s might be related to the constitution of national and cultural identities in Ireland in the post‐colonial period. Particular attention is given to Yeats’s own marginal position as Anglo‐Irish.As the representation of landscape, imagined with its `natural’ inhabitants, contributes to the construction of national and cultural identities, colonialism produces contesting, and sometimes ambivalent, representations of the land and its occupants. In a period of social change and ‘re‐positioning’ for both the Irish and Anglo‐Irish, Yeats’s travellers are found to be located within the rural idyll of ‘Gaelic Ireland ’ rather than the rural idyll of anglicized Ireland/England. However, I propose that they do not quite form part of this idyll. Furthermore, the depiction of both travellers and landscape is seen to be ambivalent, questioning the security of Yeats’s relation to the ‘Irishness ’ represented.I suggest that the figure of the traveller cannot be isolated from anti‐modern discourses of poetic wandering originating outside Ireland. Yeats’s landscape represents a touristic idyll marked as ‘Irish ’ but also as Utopian and timeless. The viewer’s imagined occupancy of the role of tourist–traveller in this idyll is disturbed however by Yeats’s depiction of the traveller as unromanticized, poor and migrant. In post‐colonial Irish culture, the figure of the traveller accumulated diverse connotations associated with the needs for identity and identification generated by cultural shifts towards national definition and exclusions, as well as by the ongoing changes of modernity.

Images of community in Old English poetry

This book explores ideas of community and the relationship of individuals to communities widely evident in Old English poetry. It pays particular attention to the context in which major poetic manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period were received, a time when concerns about community appear to have been of special urgency. The book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in this period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts. Magennis analyses a wide range of poems and examines the imagery on which they draw, concentrating particularly on depictions of hall (including feasting and drinking), stronghold, city and landscape. In a poetry in which communal structures are typically associated with male ideals of warriorship and fellowship, the position and treatment of women is also shown to merit close consideration.

John Barth and the anxiety of continuance

With its control of sugar plantations in Caribbean and tea, cotton, and indigo production in India, Britain in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated global economy of tropical agriculture. In Colonizing Nature, Beth Fowkes Tobin shows how dominion over the as both a region and an idea became central to way in which Britons imagined their role in world. Tobin examines georgic poetry, landscape portraiture, natural history writing, and botanical prints produced by Britons in Caribbean, South Pacific, and India to uncover how each played a crucial role in developing belief that tropics were simultaneously paradisiacal and in need of British intervention and management. Her study examines how slave garden portraits denied horticultural expertise of slaves, how East India Company hired such artists as William Hodges to paint and thereby Anglicize landscape and gardens of British-controlled India, and how writers from Captain James Cook to Sir James E. Smith depicted tropical lands and plants. Just as mastery of tropical nature, and especially its potential for agricultural productivity, became key concepts in formation of British imperial identity, Colonizing Nature suggests that intellectual and visual mastery of tropics-through creation of art and literature-accompanied material appropriations of land, labor, and natural resources. Tobin convincingly argues that depictions of tropical plants, gardens, and landscapes that circulated in British imagination provide a key to understanding forces that shaped British Empire. Beth Fowkes Tobin is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is author of Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting.

The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome

The Romans were fascinated with landscape--with a love for the organization of space that can be seen as clearly in their pictorial arts as in their arrangement of public and private architecture. In this interdisciplinary work Eleanor Leach links the depiction of landscape in Roman literature and in Roman painting during a formative period of Roman art. In relating the two fields, she focuses on the response of audiences, particularly the way in which perceptions shaped by one of the arts are transferred to the other.The persuasive rhetorical orientation of much Roman art assigns the spectator a vital role. To study that role, Leach brings contemporary semiotic methodology to bear on ancient rhetorical theory. First she contrasts landscapes that fulfill a narrative function, such as those in the Odyssey Frieze and Vergil's Aeneid, with cartographic landscapes used for informational purposes. She then considers the two Augustan genres of sacral-idyllic and architectural landscape. Finally she discusses the reader's contribution to the understanding of mythological narrative painting, and, conversely, the way in which certain Roman authors incorporate visual imagery into their mythological allusions and narratives to control the reader's point of view.

Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840

Voyage into Substance reopens the whole complex question of how nature was perceived and penetrated during the Enlightenment--a time when artist-scientists trekked across Egyptian deserts, astronomer-mariners navigated the Polar seas, and meteorologist-aeronauts sailed through the atmosphere's waves, all seeking to discover and record the non-human likeness of the phenomenal world.By examining the popular, multi-national illustrated narratives and atlases of the period, the book relates the voyagers' attentive, firsthand mode of seeing and precise copying of the enduring and the ephemeral features of the environment (before the advent of photography) to the major philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic debates of the time. Arguing that these accounts disclose an anti-Picturesque tradition of representation, the book opens new doors to establish the persistence of a plain, that is, a style of landscape depiction that culminates in 19th-century realism.Voyage into Substance analyzes a vast repertory of geological, mineralogical and biological treatises concerning the self-expressive physiognomy of the earth and shows them to be important precursors and allies of the non-fictional travel narrative. Intertwining art, literature, philosophy, geography, and the history of science, with the aid of 304 plates, the book adds significantly to all these disciplines and is a unique contribution to the field of art and architectural history as well as to modern intellectual history.Publication of this book was partially funded by the Millard Meiss Fund of the College Art Association of America and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Landscape Depiction and Perception: A Transactional Approach

Abstract A conceptual framework that centers upon the relations between landscapes, informational media, and landscape perception is proposed. The framework integrates the transactional approach to landscape perception with a model of the character of media depictions and centers upon transactions with landscapes through direct experience and upon transactions with landscapes through the filter of the images depicted by the media. The example of the motion picture is stressed as a popular medium, although the framework is capable of accommodating all informational media.

Trecento Classicism and the Campanile Hexagons

After offering some useful definitions of classicism as it relates to the Italian Gothic period, this study explores the use of classical sources in the sculpture of Andrea Pisano. The bronze doors on the Baptistry of Florence contain isolated quotations from or references to the antique with no consistent integration of classical motifs to the Gothic idiom. On the Campanile there is evident an increasing appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of classical sculpture--indeed, of Roman sculpture derived from the most classic phases of Greek art. The Campanile hexagons reveal interests that anticipate those of the Renaissance: the depiction of naturalistic landscape, the representation of interior space, the portrayal of the nude as an idealized and sensuous form, and the idealization of contemporary topical concerns by means of their identification with ancient imagery.