Year: 2003
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis explores the condition of postmodernism-as a contemporary cultural field based on images and constantly new presentations-and the tenacious presence of Nature as an assumed point of authenticity or authority beyond representations.To understand the complex relationship between postmodernism and Nature, I focus on the phenomenon of Sport Utility Vehicles-or rather, I look at how SUV advertisements deploy 'natural' landscapes in order to authorize specific human desires and certain philosophical presuppositions.I then turn to Gary Snyder, whose work is symptomatic of American Nature Writing in that it depends on pre-constructed ways of seeing and knowing the so-called natural world.Finally, I use a close reading of an essay by Terry Tempest Williams as a way of fleshing out the general structure of 'textuality' that always already functions as we interpret the world.My overall argument is that since Nature cannot ever be detached from this general structure of iii
Author: Christopher Schaberg
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W641774117