The Faces of Landscape

Catalog description

Landscapes are views of the world: sites seen as well as ways of seeing and knowing. Representations of landscape invite us to perceive the world while instructing us how to conceive it. Drawing on poetry and prose, narrative and philosophy, painting, photography, and film, this course will explore landscapes as symbolic sites that are also physical places, windows on reality that mirror our subjectivity. Our focus will be on the Romantic landscape and its transformation by and into the modern city. The Romantic self reads the face of nature as an ambivalent text, by turns beautiful and sublime, vivifying and deathly, familiar and strange. Romantic “spots of time,” local reservoirs of psychic meanings, register the growth of the mind as well as the passage of history, reflecting and resisting the ruinous progress of industrialization and commodification that overwrites the Book of Nature with a new system of inorganic signs. The modern city both negates the Romantic landscape and recovers it in the second nature of streets, façades, and crowds. Turning to the cityscape, we will examine its hiding places for modern fugitives from modernity and their melancholy pursuers. We will theorize landscapes from psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological points of view and, in turn, consider the role of landscape in these theoretical writings. Texts may include Romantic prose and poetry by Burke, Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley; modern and postmodern writing by Baudelaire, Stein, Woolf, Césaire, and Borges; cultural and aesthetic theory by Freud, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Smithson, Jackson, Cosgrove, Rose, and Taussig.