Dietrich Harth, "The Invention of Cultural Memory" (Summary)

American literature has a minority tradition of landscape writing that counters the values of progress, development, and improvement celebrated by a dominant tradition. Marginalized writings have become increasingly important to us because they serve as a hedge against social change and rescue the dominant culture in difficult times. One major shift in our scientific world view in the twentieth century has been to recognize the importance of systems and relationships in the phenomenal world. We have begun to recognize that an entity is largely created and undergoes change by its interaction with other entities. The hope for absolute, discrete, and unchangeable essence has disappeared, replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, chaos theory, and such sciences as ecology. More recently, many have celebrated the rise of a holistic world view that is more compatible with ecological discoveries than Cartesian dualism.

Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has incorporated much of the thinking about systems and relationships long ago embraced by the hard sciences into his literary theories. His work provides an ideal starting point for an ecological analysis of landscape writing. Bakhtin's theories might be seen as the literary equivalent of ecology, the science of relationships. The ideal form to represent reality is a dialogical form, one in which multiple voices or points of view interact. This dialogue among differing points of view gives value to a variety of socio-ideological positions. An ecological literary criticism could explore how authors have represented the interaction of both human and nonhuman voices in the landscape.

Dialogics in landscape writing can be applied to explore the anthropocentric nature of our time and the values we place on representation. However, there are varying degrees of egoism, and some writers attempt to dissolve their egos and enter the private worlds of different entities in the landscape. This self-reflexive stance rejects the duplicity that often leads viewers to believe that extreme close-up or telephoto shots with no humans in sight is the real nature.

Another problem in applying dialogics to landscape writing is the marked absence of human society in much of the writing. While it might seem that the application of Bakhtin's theory would become questionable, he argues that wherever there is a human voice, there is evidence of other human beings because we are each a result of our interaction with others. Language is necessarily a social construct, and the language we write carries evidence of social values, which are capable of expressing themselves.

A dialogical analysis of landscape literature emphasizes the intertextuality of a text, as it answers other texts within its genre. For Bakhtin, genre is always collectivive, indicating social forces at work. Landscape writing tends to incorporate a variety of genres, and the history of literatre is the struggle between the novel and other already-existing genres.

American literature often portrays the sameness of urban life across the United States and Canada to establish a connection with the reader, leading to an increasingly conformist society. This is ideal for an approved, "official" literature that bulldozes local hillsides to make a homogeneous American literature. Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope encourages us to recover the representation of place in even works of "essential noninterest in the land." The chronotope binds together elements of story, geography, and self, reminding us of the local, vernacular, folk elements of literature, which are rooted in place.

Bakhtin questions the significance of these chronotopes and answers that they are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. This critique of American literature needs to address the interconnections of time and place in narrative to avoid creating a conformist society and a homogeneous American literature. Analyzing landscape in narrative becomes not only a key to understanding how we have viewed the relationship of humans and nature but also a key to understanding at least some of the meanings of a narrative.

Historically, a change occurred in how nature was perceived, from something in which we participate to landscape, which is "nature conceived as horizon" and "environment. Picturesque remnants of nature became "scenes" or "views," and what is important to humans began to shift to a space that is Josed and private. Then, nature itself became a living participant in the events of life, fragmented into metaphors and comparisons serving to sublimate individual and private affairs and adventures not connected in any real or intrinsic way with nature itself. Much writing today views nature solely as a backdrop to the really important things, which are human marters divorced from a nature that remains "out there."

In contrast, Bakhtin presents the idyllic chronotope, which has been very important in the history of the novel. He identifies the idyll as a model for restoring "folkloric time," the relationship of time and space in the idyll as an organic fastening-down, grafting life and its events to a place. Many familiar English and American literary works would be unrecognizable without their landscapes, such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex, D. H. Lawrence's Midlands, William Cather's prairies, and Robinson Jeffers' Big Sur coast.

The "carnivalistic" tendency in landscape writing has led to a more diverse and accurate representation of the natural world. This approach differs from earlier, more monologic landscape writing, which focused on colonial settlement and dehumanization of real Indians. More recent writers aim to divest themselves of human preconceptions and enter the natural world as animal participants, allowing the landscape to enter them through their writing.

However, the unofficial, folkloric, bodily reality is still the bodily reality of humans, not other creatures. Animals' perceptions and realities are different, and we can try to imitate them by confining our sensory perceptions to those of the animal and imagining the perceptions of those senses in which we are deficient. Bakhtin's thinking on the carnival parallels John Brinckerhoff Jackson's distinction between the "official" and the "vernacular" landscape in his analysis of landscape.

The simplistic "jobs versus environment" arguments often prioritize immediate, short-term economic needs over long-term economic and environmental good. A more romantic official landscape now increasingly forced upon the local experience is a nostalgic landscape of national forests, undammed wild and scenic rivers, unplowed national grasslands, and ungrazed federal wildlife refuges, all of which are nearly peopleless.

Cheryll Burgess's "Toward an Ecological Literary Criticism" presents a useful typology of ecological literary criticism, suggesting four types: images of nature in canonical literature, biographical criticism, theory, and practical application of theoretical ecological concepts to specific rituals.

Some ecologically conscious literary critics also condemn Western civilization for its oppression of nature and all other forms of "the other." They often find answers in Eastern thought or the religious attitudes of primitive peoples, while admiring the best of primitive and Eastern attitudes towards the natural world.

Another tendency in criticism of landscape and nature writing is to discover eternal themes and recurring characters in the literature. While understanding the integration of natural cycles and rhythms in literature is important, the author avoids the myth and symbol school of criticism due to the leveling and homogenizing effect of such usually ahistorical approaches.

Ecological literary criticism addresses various concerns related to the representation of landscape in literature. One such concern is srylistic, which explores the implications of metaphors used in writing. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors' Way By provides a fundamental analysis of the implications of metaphors in writing. Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land is one of the best models for analyzing metaphors specifically related to landscape.

Mcdowell explores how landscape writers have modified existing genres and modes, such as pastoral literature, to incorporate a more accurate understanding of the complex relationships within nature. Critics argue that pastoral literature has been criticized for its benign, simplified, and citified view of the natural world, while others like Joan Tetterly point to it as an ageless form of environmental literature and the repository of ideas about humankind's place in nature.

Mcdowell discusses the challenges faced by landscape writers in breaking out of the prisonhouse of genre and hybridizing new forms, genres, and modes. They argue that a freer heuristic "anatomy" of views of humanity in nature is needed, as it allows for a more flexible attention to views of humans in nature. The beauty and strength of landscape writing, as demonstrated by Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller, are due to its ability to absorb many other genres.

A third concern in the practical application of ecological criticism is the ways landscape writers have enabled a dialogical interplay of voices in contradictory and contradictory ways. The best landscape writers suppress their egos and give voices to the many elements of a landscape by using techniques that Bakhtin identifies and praises in his discussions of nineteenth-century novels.

Mcdowell suggests that the environment creates characters or characters, so studying the environment with which a character interacts will reveal much about the character. An exploration of the dialogic voices in a landscape leads naturally to an analysis of the values a writer has recognized as inherent in a landscape, rather than imposed upon it. Analyzing the values a particular writer has allowed to adhere to their descriptions and narrations can help understand the integral relationship between value and landscape.