From virgin land to Disney world : nature and its discontents in the USA of yesterday and today / edited by Bernd Herzogenrath.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964- editor.

Series:

Critical studies (Amsterdam, Netherlands) ; v. 15.

Critical studies ; 15

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy of nature--United States.

Philosophy of nature.

Civilization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (432 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Rodopi, 2001.

Summary:

With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era -- a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing.

Contents:

Nature’s Nation/Nation’s Nature: An Introduction / Bernd Herzogenrath

Re-Animations: Instinct and Civility after the Ends of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ / Adrian Ivakhiv

The Postmodernist’s Journey Into Nature: From Philo of Alexandria to Pocahontas and Back Again, By Way of Jean-François Lyotard / James Kirwan

Democracy and Its Discontent: Tocqueville and Baudrillard on the Nature of “America” / Marco Diani

Custom Is Our Nature: Cavell and Wittgenstein versus Freud / Ursula Göricke

Looking Forward/Looking Back: Thomas Cole and the Belated Construction of Nature / Bernd Herzogenrath

Oceanic Terrain: Peristaltic and Ecological Sublimity in Poe’s The Journal of Julius Rodman and Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains / Lee Rozelle

Postmodern Eden: Nature and the City on a Hill in Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems / Bill Freind

“Back to the Garden:” The Liberation of the Id in the Antinomian 60s / David R. Williams

Peckinpah’s Walden: The Violent Indictment of “Civilization” in The Wild Bunch / Asbjørn Grønstad

Inhuman(e) Subjects: Postmodern Theory and Contemporary Animal Liberation Fiction / Nicholas Spencer

The Pomo Tingle: From Mundanity to Sublimity and Back Again / Michael Angelo Tata

The Re-construction of Nature: Postmodern Ecology and the Kissimmee River Restoration Project / Laura Barrett and Daniel R. White

Conversations in the Rust Belt / Tim Collins

The Nature and Culture Debate in Popular Forms of Emergent Spirituality in America / Michael York

Modern Primitivism: The Recent History of Civilization’s Discontents / William Cummings

The Angel in the Ecosystem Revisited: Disney’s Pocahontas and Postmodern Ethics / Roxana Preda

The Manifest Disharmony of Ephemeral Culture: Art, Ecology, and Waste Management in American Culture / Megan C. McShane

Wilderness Icons: The Difficulty of Representing the Desert / Claire T. Lawrence

Oasis/Mirage: Fantasies of Nature in Las Vegas / Natasha Dow Schüll

Colonizing the Imagination: Disney’s Wilderness Lodge / Jennifer Cypher and Eric Higgs

List of Contributors / Bernd Herzogenrath.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

90-04-33393-2

OCLC:

49005205

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004333932 DOI