Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 13:49:51 -0600 (MDT)
From: deaun moulton <deaun-AT-unm.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Literature and Space


On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, David Langston wrote:

> The main problem is whether it is legitimate to use the term, "space," to
> designate that enduring form.  While I have some deep reservations, critics
> like Joseph Frank and Gaston Bachelard have confidently used the term,
> "space," to identify literary tropes and meanings which resist the
> mutability of history. 

Are the two (time and space) opposed to one another?  In other words, does
one of them have to be stable so that the other one can be fluid?

> > It also sounds like Manifest Destiny which projected the western North
> > American continent as "space" fit for conquering by the white American
> > agents of progress.
> 
> I would say that the Puritan sense of "wilderness" probably suggests an
> alien space which needs redemption; however, by the nineteenth century,
> that notion had been reversed, had it not?  

Well not completely.  Certainly there are those that Perry Miller calls
the Idoloters of Nature.  We still have some of those...

But I would say that the Mormon pioneers still saw the wilderness as a
place for redemption and I don't think that your average Weyerhauser
tree farmer thinks of the wilderness as a site of "goodness" as much as it
may be a field of resources.  Still it seems to me that in either
case....with nature as a place to be idealized or as a source of profit,
that nature is a "space"  which is "out there" and  is alienated from
those things which are human.


> Up to now I would have said that the notion of "wilderness" as a pristine
> ideal landscape where human beings could never step without corrupting is
> a THIRD idea.  Its antecedents are equally Romantic (Thoreau: "in wildness
> is the preservation of the world") but I have not -- up to now -- put it
> in the same register with Charles Kingsley, Horacy Greeley, or Fred'k
> Jackson Turner.  One difference lies in how much of the western space
> could be commodified and made "useful."  Thoreau and Muir and the Sierra
> Club see wilderness as "useful" only so long as it remains the reified
> Other, constantly reminding us of the ideals toward which we should
> strive;  the party of Greely and Turner see wilderness as "useful" when it
> eventually becomes "civilized" and has been tamed to be productive. 


Yes.

> On a philosophical and critical plane, however, I have a number of
> reservations about too quickly collapsing an epistemological sense of
> space or spatiality in Kantian and post-Kantian thought into notions of
> either architecture or geography.  Reading these two senses of "space" in
> terms of each other CAN reveal decisive cultural and political themes, but
> finally they are not identical because at some point the spaces of
> architecture and geography are only metaphorical elaborations, or perhaps
> loose analogies, of the phenomenological sense of spatiality as a
> necessary condition -- and counterpoint for temporality -- for all our
> experience. 

Never my intent to collapse the philosophical point into a political one.
I do argue however, that is often easier to see the philosophical point
through the lens of its political manifestations.

deaun.




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