Alternative Spaces, Shifting Landscapes: Perception, Orientation and Literary Form in Nineteenth-Century America

An exploration of nineteenth-century American texts, supplemented by appropriate theory and some attention to visual culture, which throw the constructed, culturally mediated character of landscape and inhabited space into relief. On the one hand, controlling the perception and intelligibility of landscape, and situating space within the US national imaginary, are fundamental to an expansionary American nationalism in an era of so-called “Manifest Destiny.” Such projection of US nationhood into landscape and milieu includes: 1) extensive mapwork organizing an initially alien continent into sections and townships mandated by the Congressional Land Ordinance of 1785, effectually ensuring what William Boelhower terms a “single bounded juridical space” whereby great variations in climate and topography become visible in print as a “uniform” geometric language; 2) picturesque, highly aestheticized images of national landscape, widely circulated in picture-books or available on museum canvas, that cater to a growing geographic chauvinism while often relying, nevertheless, on European painterly techniques extending all the way back to the seventeenth century; 3) the emergence in art and writing of an American sublime whereby natural spectacles such as Niagara Falls are located within a specifically nationalized geography but are nevertheless assumed to endow such geography with a timeless, sacred dimension. Even as sense of landscape is controlled and mediated through such organizing lenses, a counter-sensitivity develops to the way landscape ultimately remains in the play of culturally mediated truth, falling between, for example, Western paintings and cartography and an alternative sense of landscape that writers such as Thoreau and Margaret Fuller begin to develop in studying native tribal cultures. In what will be predominantly a literary course supplemented by extra-literary cultural materials, our focus will be on how landscape remains an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and cartographical settlement in the nineteenth-century US. Let me add that I’ve reserved a portion of this course for the study of architecturally organized space and how it is also deconstructed by certain authors–among them Poe and Henry James–by way of reaching through ostensibly settled, culturally controlled space into the underlying openness of the here and now.