Settling and Unsettling Space in United States Literature and Visual Culture

(4 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In his essay "Experience" (1844), Emerson poses a founding question for American culture: "Where do we find ourselves?" The definition of territory is a fundamental issue in American culture, whose history is one of appropriation, expropriation, conquest, and forced displacement. This seminar will examine the writing and representation of landscape in the United States from the 19th to the 20th century, paying particular attention to the notions of utopia, discovery, and fugitivity. Since Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, the literary canon has been interested in territory and landscape, but this space is also a space whose stakes become vital in the context of conquest and slavery. Based on a corpus of texts and pictorial works from the 19th and 20th centuries, this seminar will question the relationship to space in the United States in order to explore the lines of tension between installation and fugitivity as well as their impact on the modalities of representation of the landscape.