Picturing land
Course Description
This graduate seminar investigates the aesthetics and politics of landscape over the course of the long eighteenth century. We’ll consider works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose, as well as drawings, paintings, and architectural plans and images. This multimedia landscape environment will require us to remain attuned to the different ways in which media represent and formalize space. How might a relationship to space be organized differently, that is, in a country house poem with a prospect view than in a novel whose narrative is interrupted by descriptive interludes? And how do these different approaches to space impact the time and space of reading?
Throughout the course, we’ll also consider the relationships between the landscape arts, pastoral depictions of nature, and actual working environments, as well as the classes of persons and modes of labor that were often obscured by representations of landscape. And we’ll ask why, at the very moment when agrarian capitalism was flourishing in England, did new forms of appreciation for so-called wilderness (uninhabited or uninhabitable land) emerge?
Our inquiries will take us beyond the space of the English countryside—and beyond questions of class antagonism too. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship, as well as Black and Native studies approaches to land and sea, we’ll consider the relationship between the aesthetics of landscape (including the picturesque and the sublime) and processes of colonial conquest. To what extent did aesthetic forms and responses mediate metropolitan encounters with colonial environments, especially the tropics? And what other modes of producing landscape emerged in these places? What presuppositions—about the nature of land and its relationship with the human—undergirded these various approaches to landscape? What, finally, is land?
Primary texts will include works by Joseph Addison, James Thomson, James Grainger, John Dyer, Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, William Bartram, Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Arthur Young, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. Critics will include Raymond Williams, Ann Bermingham, John Barrell, Cynthia Wall, David Marshall, David Fairer, Brenna Bhandar, Tiffany Lethabo King, Monique Allewaert, and others.