The Poetics of the Province in Susan Stewart's "Forest"

This paper reflects on an art project developed by the author which was commissioned for the exhibition STILL LIFE/ecologies of perception in 2013 by Trust New Art . The artists brief was relatively open but demanded some kind of response to Leigh Woods where the work would be located. The Woods themselves are a National Trust nature reserve situated within walking distance of Bristol, but separated from the city by the imposing cliffs of the Avon Gorge. The resultant work ‘Autumn’ (2013) existed in two related forms - as object and as action. The object took the form of a tailored country-style suit printed with a camouflage pattern based on W. J. Mullers painting ‘Autumn’ (1833). As action it manifested itself as a series of walks beginning in Leigh Woods where Muller’s work was painted, stretching to Bristol Museum in the city centre, where the original painting now hangs. During the exhibition period the artist regularly walked this route across urban/rural thresholds wearing the camouflage suit. The whole project echoes something Tim Morton talks about in ‘Ecology Without Nature’ when he imagines an aesthetic practice that could link urban and rural perspectives. He stated that: “Romantic ecology seeks a place away from the enervating, phantasmagoric illusions of city life, as well as the industry, dirt, and noise. Might one do something perverse and combine the fantasy thing of Romantic ecology – the resonant idea of place – with the thinking generated by critical consumerism and its ultimate paragon, the urban stroller, the De Quincy, the Baudelaire? It should not be impossible in principle, since nature is already the quintessence of kitsch. But it appears so. It is as if there is a critical discourse of the country, and a critical discourse of the city, to match the other ways in which the country and the city have been kept apart in poetics and ideology”. (p. 169 Morton) This project then, asks whether a ‘sublime’ or ‘romantic’ experience necessarily precludes new ways of relating and responding to landscape.

Journal of Scottish Thought, 2019

Given Hepburn's importance in both establishing the discipline of environmental aesthetics, and his prefiguring of the development of the environmental humanities, it is surprising that his work has not been applied in aiding our understanding of the present-day renaissance in British nature writing, known as the new nature writing. Equally surprising is the fact that new nature writing itself has not sought to employ Hepburn in the context of its own creative non-fiction, to articulate its own aims. The context of the environmental humanities, therefore offers a fortuitous framework to carry out this comparative project between Hepburn and new nature writing. This has the benefit of both illustrating Hepburn's aesthetic philosophy in action, and of bringing the key elements of new nature's implicit philosophy of environmental aesthetics, expressed in its aesthetic output, into relief. This examination will apply a range of elements from Hepburn's aesthetic writings to the analysis of new nature writing.

This essay will make a case for the re-enchantment of the human environment through creative artistic expression, and especially through literature. Taking Roger Deakin's exploration of the human relationship with trees as an illustration, I will argue for the importance of emotion and subjectivity in people's relationship to their outside environment, and furthermore explore the influence that narrative has on our understanding of the outside world. Following Max Weber's discussion of the effects of de-enchantment (Entzauberung) in modernity, I argue that the loss of place-specific narratives, attachment and meaning can result in the objectification of the outside world. Modern narratives emphasize objectivity, rationality and a separation between man and nature. New nature writing such as Deakin's can be a way forward precisely because it places personal experience and individual responses at the centre in a way that is reminiscent of ethnography's 'Thick Description'. Engagement with place and continuous narratives are important because they will inform what we perceive in a place and furthermore provide a basis for evaluating change. Moreover, narrative understanding reclaims the particular from the universalising forces of the Enlightenment. As the feminist scholar Deborah Slicer argues, morality and care evolve from personal affectations and relationships, rather than from universal principles. Deakin stresses the co-evolvement of people and places and the ways in which we shape one another. Place thus forms the 'Other' in a relationship and can only ever be partly captured by our concepts. On an individual level, the nature-culture divide can thus be bridged through people's emotional investment in a place that has become part of them and consequently acts on them as much as they act on it. Importantly, Deakin shows that alternative visions do exist within Western thinking about the human-nature relationship and that not only indigenous people, but Western people likewise can develop emotional ties to the places they inhabit. Places in the natural world will have meaning for their identity and community. Considering the recent surge of interest in indigenous rights and land claims, I would argue that place-bound narratives in the West could likewise underscore communities' claims to be involved in the protection of their surroundings and the decision-making processes that affect these places. Thus, narrative can be understood both as resistance and as an expression of local, embedded knowledge and ways of seeing and experiencing.

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics

This article presents a general conception of aesthetic experience built on an analysis of the relationship between the narrative and the ambient dimensions of the aesthetic value of a natural environment, the forest. First of all, the two dimensions are presented with respect to the possibilities and problems raised by distinguishing between them. Next, the possibilities of their relationship are analysed and it is argued that they are strongly complementary. This complementarity becomes the core of the proposed conception of aesthetic experience, which can explain the difference between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, and can also provide an answer to the question of the non-reductive differentiation between the aesthetic experience of nature and the experience of a work of art. The conclusion of the article is mainly concerned to eliminate one of the problems localized in presenting the ambient dimension (the ambience paradox), by means of Ricoeur's conception of the relationship between time and narrative. Mehr als eine Geschichte: die zweidimensionale Ästhetik des Waldes Dieser Artikel stellt ein allgemeines Konzept ästhetischer Erfahrung vor, das sich auf eine Analyse der Beziehung zwischen der narrativen und ambienten Dimension des ästhetischen Werts der natürlichen Umwelt, konkret des Waldes, stützt. Zunächst werden die beiden Dimensionen im Hinblick auf die Möglichkeiten und Probleme vorgestellt, die ihre Unterscheidung mit sich bringt. Dann werden die Möglichkeiten analysiert, die ihr Verhältnis bietet; vordergründig wird ihre starke Komplementarität hervorgehoben. Diese Komplementarität wird zugleich zum Kern der vorgestellten Konzeption ästhetischer Erfahrung, die nicht nur den Unterschied zwischen dem Ästhetischen und dem Nicht-Ästhetischen zu erklären vermag, sondern zugleich auch eine Antwort auf die Frage nach einer nichtreduktiven Unterscheidung zwischen einer ästhetischen Erfahrung der Natur und der Erfahrung mit Kunstwerken bietet. Abschließend versucht die Studie unter Rückgriff auf das Verhältnis von Zeit und Erzählung bei Paul Ricoeur, ein Problem-das Paradox des Ambienten-zu lösen, das sich bei der Vorstellung der ambienten Dimension ergeben hat. I. INTRODUCTION In this article we wish to present a general conception of aesthetic experience, which is based on the experience not of works of art, but of the natural environment, the forest in particular. Both in the introductory presentation of our aim and throughout the essay we shall proceed from the lower levels of generality towards higher levels. Concrete experience and the description derived from it are a suitable starting point not only for a possible solution of most problems connected with the aesthetic dimension of a forest, a landscape, or other natural environment, but also, ultimately, aesthetic perception in general. For an example of this sort of description we turn to a classic of 'forest literature' , the nineteenth-century

AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, 2023

Much of Robert Frost's poems begin in delight and end in wisdom with a sharp clarity of life's problems and approaches. Unlike Wordsworth, who worshipped nature, Robert Frost presented man as the focal point in most of his poems; his treatment of nature was a mixed feeling-both a sense of awe and mysticism. Man, nature, and environment are the three issues that come under repeated scrutiny in most of his poems, where he explores the effect of man on his environment and vice-versa. His portrayal of the situation where human beings grapple their way out patiently in their disagreeable mood-makes it more relevant in today's context. Robert Frost reveals man the nature dichotomy, the interrelationship between them to strike tragic depths though not communicative but always at loggerheads. This poem under study stretches afar and meanders into a quintessential search for truth and problems confronting man pitted against nature. The main aim of this article is to unravel his ambivalent views of nature, human character, and the mutual interrelationship between them with a specific focus on the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" which, expresses profound clarification on human experience against the backdrop of nature. What is Robert Frost's understanding of nature? Why is man endlessly confronting with nature/surroundings? Does man's inner strength have any role to play are some of the questions that seek to find out in this study. A detailed analysis of this poem reveals man's quest for truth in the contemporary consumeristic culture, offering little space for man to be in harmony with nature. Robert Frost universalized this encounter with nature.

William Kentridge thinks a lot about thinking: its errant trails, its spasmodic lurches, its spectacular leaps. Drawing, he has often stressed, can function as a form of thinking but equally– and especially when chased by the artist’s eager eraser – it enacts a wilful un-thinking in which every notion can potentially be undone, and every idea arrives partnered with a nay-saying dialectical double. These revisionary “second thoughts” often assume human, usually Kentridgian form, striding onstage during the artist’s public lectures to chide, correct and contradict. Fingers are wagged, eyebrows raised, eyes rolled in exasperation. “The horn of the rhinoceros is in the wrong place,” one superego character chimes. “I don’t want to hear it,” the other retorts. “But if you would just take the time to look at these textbooks, you could see how it could be done better…” the first nags. “Just fuck off! Just fuck off!” the second repeats exasperatedly. At “Second-Hand Reading,” Kentridge’s recent keynote lecture at the University of Rochester,...

Scottish Literary Review 2.2 (2010): 216-217.

2007

According to Elleke Boehmer, the 'obsessive quality of Conrad's language' representing the forest reflects the author's anxiety at the inability of Western confidence to compass this Other or, in fact, t o subdue it. Like many Europeans writing about places distant in space and type from the familiarities of home, Conrad resorts to the language of the sublime-not Longinus's sublime of 'excellence and distinction' but Edmund Burke's sublime of 'delight' in 'danger and pain' (Boehmer 2005:92; Longinus 1965:100; Burke 1844:52). The quoted passage is saturated with the sense of a terrifying unknown that is totally alien and yet familiar to the observer's own brutal and repressed racial memory. Though the African forest seems like an 'unknown planet', it is actually 'prehistoric': in 'taking possession' of it, its colonizers would re-enact an ancient and familiar moment of subjugation. Chinua Achebe, reacting furiously to Conrad's Manichean portrayal of Africa as '"the other world" and the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization' (Achebe 1977:785), showed in Things Fall Apart one of the thriving, orderly human societies that existed beyond the trees blocking Conrad's view. Achebe's fictional community in this novel is called 'Umuofia', which significantly means 'People of the Forest'. Contradicting the nightmarish forest symbolism of Heart of Darkness, as Evan Mwangi (2004) explains, 'In the forests of Umuofia, there is a system of education, a rich philosophy, and sophisticated art, not to mention a complex religion and medical practice'. Of course the 'African village life and its richness' (Mwangi 2004) sustained in and by

This paper covers works of literature pertaining to forests, the spirituality and secrecy of those forests, in works of Irish and British literature, including the early Irish nature poets, the lais of Marie de France, Shakespeare's pastoral comedies, Pope's "Winsdor Forest," the Gothic and distant forests of the Romantic and Victorian periods, the decimated forests of Auden and of the Battle of the Somme in David Jones epic poem "In Parenthesis," and the postmodern sense of forests in Charlotte Mew's "The Trees are Down," as well as efforts toward reforestation in maintaining this vital connection between humanity and the trees.

2020

News from Nowhere (1890), Old Hammond describes England as 'a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt'. His companion Guest, a time traveller from the nineteenth century who has already been entertained with a brief tour of twenty-second-century London, questions this description. 'One thing, it seems to me, does not go with your word of "garden" for this country', he observes; 'you have spoken of wastes and forests, and I myself have seen the beginnings of your Middlesex and Essex forest. Why do you keep such things in a garden? And isn't it very wasteful to do so?' The explanation Old Hammond offers is that, as a society, Nowherians 'like these pieces of wild nature and can afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to the forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and sons' sons will do the like.' 1 The wild thus has its place in Nowhere, serving both an aesthetic and a practical function. It meets, as Paul Meier observes, 'a dominating and impelling human need to draw from nature the means of existence as well as visual pleasure and healthy well-being'. 2 Living in an age in which, Morris claimed, 'if the air and the sunlight and the rain could have been bottled up and monopolized for the profit of the individual it would have been', it is no surprise that his vision of the future is one in which humanity has found a more appreciative and constructive engagement with the natural world. 3 News from Nowhere is largely regarded as Morris's culminating, if highly personalized, vision of Socialist ideals in practice. In May Morris's words, 'it epitomizes so much' in terms of Morris's thoughts and activities as a political campaigner in the 1880s, offering an imaginative interpretation of the ideas he had explored in his political lectures regarding how human beings might organize their communities and their interactions with Nature in a post-revolutionary society