From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and TodayBRILL, 2016 M08 22 - 432 pages With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era – a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing. |
Contents
Instinct and Civility after the Ends of Man and Nature | 7 |
From Philo of Alexandria to Pocahontas and Back Again By Way of JeanFrançois Lyotard | 33 |
Tocqueville and Baudrillard on the Nature of America | 53 |
Cavell and Wittgenstein versus Freud | 69 |
Thomas Cole and the Belated Construction of Nature | 83 |
Peristaltic and Ecological Sublimity in Poes The Journal of Julius Rodman and Isabella Birds A Ladys Life in the Rocky Mountains | 105 |
Nature and the City on a Hill in Charles Olsons The Maximus Poems | 123 |
The Liberation of the Id in the Antinomian 60s | 147 |
Postmodern Ecology and the Kissimmee River Restoration Project | 229 |
Conversations in the Rust Belt | 251 |
The Nature and Culture Debate in Popular Forms of Emergent Spirituality in America | 277 |
The Recent History of Civilizations Discontents | 297 |
Disneys Pocahontas and Postmodern Ethics | 317 |
Art Ecology and Waste Management in American Culture | 341 |
The Difficulty of Representing the Desert | 361 |
Fantasies of Nature in Las Vegas | 377 |
The Violent Indictment of Civilization in The Wild Bunch | 167 |
Postmodern Theory and Contemporary Animal Liberation Fiction | 187 |
From Mundanity to Sublimity and Back Again | 209 |
Disneys Wilderness Lodge | 403 |
List of Contributors | 425 |
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