Title: Writing about Writing about Nature: Beyond Traditional Essentialism and Postmodern Constructivism
Abstract: As a means of defining and ordering the world, myths play an important part in any culture. At the same time, however, myth-making inevitably privileges particular viewpoints and perspectives. This aspect of mythologizing becomes particularly striking in stories through which the members of a culture view the Other, that which is not (of) them. One such Other is nature. In the process of challenging and settling the wilderness of the American continent, for instance, the white American male certainly mythologized it, a mythology which served as an extension of the Judeo-Christian ethos that man was created in God's image and thus set to dominate the non-human world; to have dominion over all living things is the formulation given in Genesis. By vanquishing the alien wilderness and making it into a fruitful and cultivated Christian Garden, man saw himself, as Roderick Nash notes in Wilderness and the American Mind, as serving the forces of civilization, order, and enlightenment.l The Puritans and the pioneers that were to follow had little sympathy for wild country; John Winthrop's ideal vision was of a city upon a hill. Thus began a three-century long heroic myth of conquering
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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