Fictioning the Landscape

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012

Introduction to New Work on Landscape and Its Narration By the time Fredric Jameson stated that our "daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time" (Postmodernism 47), he could already rely on a whole tradition in the humanities to back his bold claim. From the 1980s onwards, scholars in the humanities recognized increasingly the arbitrary nature of their former, predominantly temporal, explanatory models of "progress," "evolution," or "history" and reached the conclusion that cultural phenomena are just as well, or perhaps better, explained by analyzing their material, spatial context. This shift of emphasis was first referred to explicitly as the "spatial turn" by Edward Soja in his Postmodern Geographies (see also Lungu). Following Michel Foucault's Of Other Spaces, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space, Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, and US-American cultural theoreticians who propagated the work of French thought (e.g., Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson) the production of modern culture in concrete living conditions became a systematic object of study. As a phenomenon that is fundamentally "produced" space was understood to mirror daily cultural praxis, social hierarchies, collective mentalities, and personal experiences. Thus the study of "lived space" came to occupy center stage in this line of research allowing for the examination of otherwise hard-to-detect phenomena such as collective identities or social power relations. Such phenomena could now be studied in a situated manner, as part of the experience of individuals' contextualized places and quotidian practices. Once the inhabited and built environment was thus considered indispensable for trying to grasp the modern (or, for some, "postmodern" or "late modern") condition, inquiry into the experience and production of landscapes, cities, and architectures came to boom, along with the field of "urban studies." It is within the framework of these developments that the Ghent Urban Studies Team <http://www.gust.ugent.be/> took the initiative of compiling the articles in New Work on Landscape and Its Narration. Contemporaneous with the spatial turn, the humanities also came to be marked by the so-called "narrative turn," which puts forward the idea that the situated production of human culture is to a great extent indebted to (often culturally determined) narrative ways of making sense of the world. Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, argued that "man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal" (216; see also Taylor). In a similar vein, Yuri Lotman advanced that our cultural information often passes through the gates of narrative: "The more people acquire freedom from the automatism of genetic planning, the more important it is for them to construct plots of events and behavior" (170). Increasingly, an idea took root that is perhaps most explicitly rendered in Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds: the notion that we do not only see the world from a rational, logico-scientific viewpoint, but also from a spontaneously narrative one, and that "the two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another" since each provides "distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality" (11). If the formation of cultural and personal identities is often a matter of narrative construction, then, it is hardly surprising that the spatial turn found a natural ally in the narrative turn. Both enable us to delve into the situatedness and experientiality of modern culture, and show how cultural and personal identities are embodied in narrative and spatial constructions. More than one research institute was called into existence in order to explore this common ground of the narrative and the spatial. In addition to individual contributors, represented in New Work on Landscape and Its Narration are the research teams of "Littérature et architecture" (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), "Narrascape" (University of Cambridge), "Space in Ancient Greek Literature" (University of Amsterdam), and the Ghent Urban Studies Team (Ghent University). However divergent the narrative media addressed in the contributions to this journal, all are imbued with the notion that our spatial surroundings and built environment are not so much empty containers or inert background décors as they are thoroughly informed by active perceptions, temporal developments, emotions, memories, and ideological values-all of which tend to be constructed through and by narration. Against this backdrop, contributors to New Work on Landscape and Its Narration concentrate on the phenomena of space and landscape understood as constructed narratively. As culturally relevant spaces connected closely with matters of identity and experience, landscapes are particularly suitable for demonstrating the relevance of the

2012

In their article &quot;Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900- 1945&quot; Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations or narrative techniques: framing, sequencing, and juxtaposing whereby their main argument is that in spite of their ideological differences the publications they discuss seek a way of dealing with processes of modernization and with the loss of a traditional way of living defined by a direct re...

The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner, 1990-2010, 2014

Landscape Review, 2004

Two writers in the early 1900s, Katherine Mansfield in New Zealand and Willa Cather in the United States tallgrass prairie, chronicled both the cultural and physical nuances of their frontiers. Their stories are set in rich textural backdrops, made vivid with their descriptions of natural environments. These descriptions provide the context for this paper's exploration. The dense and evocative imagery of these two writers provides a point of departure for a comparison of the two landscapes. The agricultural settlement patterns and natural systems of the New Zealand bush and farmland and those of the United States tallgrass prairie invite comparison. Mansfield's and Cather's narratives provide the guide for this study, capturing the subtle differences and underlying similarities of the textures and patterns of these two landscapes, while emphasising the differences in colour and scale. The degrees of separation are not as distinct as the 80 degrees of latitude that lie between them. Instead there is a myriad of subtle, rather than singular, differentiations. This visual analysis is not intended to address the significant cultural differences of these two places. Rather, it is a study of visual distinctions and similarities guided by the environmental qualities identified by a native author from each locale: Mansfield (New Zealand bush and farmland), and Cather (United States tallgrass prairie). Guided by their words, my own investigation of place is a graphic exploration of the physical environment: the line, form, pattern, texture, colour, light and spatial qualities of each landscape.

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.434187, 2006

The aim of this thesis is to use practical and theoretical research to investigate the relationship of transitional landscapes with narrative. As transitional landscapes I refer to the photographic depiction of unorganised spaces situated between the rural and urban zones. The research engages in practical fieldwork and theoretical study. It comprises a written thesis and a visual output (photographic project). The theoretical part examines the historical framework focusing in the postmodern re-evaluations of landscape photography. My research investigates if the iconographic austerity of transitional landscapes leads to interpretive austerity or on the contrary enhances their range of interpretations. The research methodology is influenced by theories that acknowledge the importance of the reader and it is qualitative and experimental. The research employs as key method visual questionnaires, which focus on the capacity of single images to prompt narrative interpretation. The groups of people that the questionnaires are distributed to, vary in their approach and regard of landscape and narrative. The results from this survey indicate how we perceive transitional landscapes, the type of narratives they suggest and what prompts them to interpret the images as specific narratives. The main findings of the study revealed that: 1. The iconographic austerity of transitional landscapes appears as a fertile ground for narratives as indicated by the high percentage of respondents who wrote narratives, the high percentage of narratives compared to descriptions and transformations and the respondents approach more as narrators rather than observers. 2. The respondents seemed to wish to categorise the transitional landscapes more as an urban or rural environment rather than a transitional environment. 3. A darker, closer to black & white landscape image is more responsive to narratives rather than the normal exposure and colour version of the same landscape image. Furthermore, transitional landscapes seem more narratively responsive in their blurred version. 4. Transitional landscapes create more pessimistic than optimistic responses justifying landscape theories based on the psychological approach to landscape. The findings are employed as a creative tool, creating the form and the content of the photographic project, which also incorporates the actual stories of the respondents for transitional landscapes. The photographic project displays two main narrative strategies in photography: a) Narratives created solely by images and b) Narratives created from combining text and image. It progress from strategy a to b in four steps, gradually shifting from vertical panoramic landscapes to horizontal panoramic ‘wordscapes'. The original contribution to knowledge is in both the artwork and the method of producing it as I am extending the boundaries of what is currently considered as the landscape genre not only in terms of collective authoring but also about the transition of the visual sign to the word sign, thus examining our processes of making sense of signs and the subjective nature of interpretation. In my concerns for transitional landscapes, I am investigating an aspect of a landscape genre, which has been marginalized in both traditional photographic history and subsequent critical debates.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012

B Bi ibliog bliogr ra aph phy of W y of Wor ork on L k on La and ndsc sca ap pe a e and I nd It ts N s Na ar rr ra at tion ion S Sofie V ofie Ve er rr ra aes est t Ghent University B Ba ar rt K t Keune eunen n Ghent University Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons

2012

"Even though place cannot be fully perceived or definitively theoretized, we may still hope to arrive at a workable conception that will help explain the importance of place to literary and cultural imagination, and the cultural work that place-responsive imaginative acts can perform" (Buell 2001, 64).

Portraits and Philosophy, ed. Hans Maes, 2020

Portraits are defined in part by their aim to reveal and represent the inner ‘character’ of a person. Because landscapes are typically viewed as lacking such an ‘inner life,’ one might assume that landscapes cannot be the subject of portraiture. However, the notion of landscape character plays an important role in landscape aesthetics and preservation. In this essay, I argue that landscape artworks can thus share in portraiture’s goal of capturing character, and in doing so present us with essential tools for revealing the often ineffable character of place. I explain the implications of this view for debates about scientific cognitivism in environmental aesthetics, representing the narrative dimension of landscape character and integrity, and appeals to the character of place in historic and environmental preservation.