Close study of mid-nineteenth-century American texts in which the mediated, culturally constructed character of landscape will be the focus of our discussion. In large measure we'll explore the epistemological invasion and colonization of "wilderness" and the continental interior: the way various modes--the picturesque, for example, or Western scalar cartography--organize so-called "natural" space and scene in specific ways that answer to underlying ideological and economic agendas. The orientation of orientation itself--the latent assumptions underwriting the seeming givenness of landscape and scene--will be the target of our scrutiny. We'll be looking at this largely from a Euro-American point of view, but in a number of the texts that we'll be exploring, an indigenous, Native American sense of landscape surges up to challenge Euro-American assumptions. Some theoretical background: readings in W.J.T. Mitchell's Landscape and Power and other such texts. Some attention to American painting and lithography. Some attention to official government maps and the assumptions and social agendas they project into landscape and topography. Primary focus on the following authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Chief Seattle, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville.