The Languages of Landscape: Contemporary Writing from the West
2007; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.2007.0014
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoE s s a y R e v i e w T h e L a n g u a g e s o f L a n d s c a p e : C o n t e m p o r a r y W r i t i n g f r o m t h e W e s t S u s a n N a r a m o r e M a h e r W o r k s R e v i e w e d Boye, Alan. Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 255 pages, $26.95. Lee, Jeff, John Calderazzo, SueEllen Campbell, and David Waag, eds. The Landscape of Home: A Rocky Mountain Land Series Reader. Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 2006. 193 pages, $17.00. Lopez, Barry and Debra Gwartney, eds. Home Ground: Language for an American landscape. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2006. 449 pages, $29.95. Taylor, David, ed. Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006. 214 pages, $29.95. White, Matt. Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait. College Station: Texas A&.M University Press, 2006. 251 pages, $19.95. In my adult life, I have lived in four distinctive geographic regions: the Hudson River Valley of Albany, New York, the Appalachian Piedmont of Columbia, South Carolina, the rolling terrain of Madison, Wisconsin, and the Loess Hills landscape of Omaha, Nebraska. My geographical education has been rich and varied, but, until I moved to Nebraska, my understanding of regional nuance was quite limited. I was barely aware of the geological and cultural complexity around me, focused as I was on pursuing degrees and moving on to the next stop in my career. In Albany, I had no awareness of the deep natural history around me, though vestiges of older worlds clearly marked the land scape. In Columbia, pressing my nose into Victorian texts, I was blind to the contact zone between coastal plain and Piedmont, to the two W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e 4 2 .3 ( F a l l 2 0 0 7 ): 2 9 5 -3 0 2 . 2 9 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 hundred million years of complicated mountain building and of oceans opening and closing and opening again. A t one point in the landscape’s history, suspect terrains— exotic fragments attached through tectonic processes— melded with continental rock, leaving evidence of a geological dynamic much like modem California’s. The stable craton bedrock under Madison is over a billion years old. An ice age event, the Wisconsonian, left a thin mantle of glacial debris around present-day Madison, a city graced by several lakes that make this university town one of the loveliest in the nation. Much of Wisconsin’s surface was at one point glaciated, but just west of the capital lies the Driftless Area, once surrounded but not overtaken by the glacial advance. Its topography remains relatively intact, a palimpsest of a pre-ice age world. Hell-bent on finishing my dissertation— a study of the permutations of the Robinson Crusoe story— I paid this unique “driftless” region little heed. A t each of these temporary homes, my inattention to the land left me without a language to translate it. My landscape illiteracy, however, did not bother me at this point in my life. I was not permanently inhabiting these places. I was moving on. My former self was content with the equivalent of one semester’s study of a language. That I did not have a vocabulary, a grammar of landscape, affected me not. Acquiring a native tongue seemed unnec essary to my survival. Moving to Nebraska, I gradually changed my perspective, and now I can perceive the poverty of my blithe inhabita tion of former places. Putting down roots...
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