English 532A
Robert E. Abrams
AQ 2008

The Shifting Landscapes of Mid-Nineteenth-Century America:
Critiquing the Imperial Gaze


On the one hand, a study of the way sense of space in the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. is conceived through the lens of maps and paintings, aesthetic conventions and discourses fraught with latent ideological implications. Pastoralism, the picturesque, and a jingoistic version of the sublime, along with a cartography deeply rooted in capitalistic economics and Western colonialism, and a tendency to view the wilderness itself through the lens of culturally endorsed paradigms and schemata–all contribute to the nationalization and settlement of the American continent in the era of Manifest Destiny. But even as sense of landscape is heavily mediated and settled through such organizing lenses, a counter-sensitivity develops to the way what W.J.T. Mitchell terms the apparent “givenness of sight and site” ultimately remains in the play of culturally mediated truth, falling between, for example, Western cartographical and aesthetic conventions and an alternative sense of landscape that writers like Thoreau and Fuller grow sensitive to in studying native tribal languages and myths. At bottom, the most fundamental object-forms (such as tree) prove surprisingly fluid and in the play of shifting perspectives. The ostensibly literal is latently interpretative. The idea of the frontier is reconceived as a ubiquitous and diffusive rather than a militantly advancing division between settled space and the unknown. In what will remain primarily a literary course supplemented by readings in spatial and epistemological theory and a review of nineteenth-century visual culture, our focus will be on how landscape becomes an unsettled question rather than a site of visual and cartographical settlement. Primary readings in Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Melville and Chief Seattle’s Speech; secondary readings will include W.J. T. Mitchell on imperial landscape, Angela Miller on nineteenth-century American painting, J.B. Harley on the rhetoric of the map, and other such texts; extra-literary cultural materials will include maps, paintings, and lithography.