USA300H1 Lecture Notes - Annette Kolodny, Pastoralism, Settler Colonialism

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USA300H1 Reimagining Landscape
Pastoralism and its critical re-imagination
o Our imagination of landscape affects how we use spaces
Political, ideological work as opposed to simply descriptive
o Classical, simple pastoral: nostalgic, idealized, labor-eliding fantasy of rurality
o Marxian complex pastoral: possible pastoralism that permits the presence of
encroaching technology; allowing the machine into the garden
A positive innovation, since is resolves pastoralisms essential errors
Complex pastoral forgoes the historicity of pastoralism; we dont have
to construct fantasies of pastoralism outside of reality
Marx preserves pastoralism, revitalizes it, allows it to survive
The middle-landscape: mediating the urban and the wilderness
o Kolodny and Hixson: critical questions of what the pastoral permits, facilitates; what is
the effect, what are the implications of viewing the American landscape as such
Kolodny: effect of viewing the landscape as virgin, feminine, etc.
Product of second-wave feminism: revealing unseen presence of
women in history, critique of historical practice as phallocentric
Hixson: effect of viewing the American landscape as American at all
Annette Kolodny and The Lay of the Land
o Fled to Canada during Vietnam war; taught in B.C.
Kolodny helped establish the first womens studies program in Canada
Post-Vietnam, working in New Hampshire and wrote The Lay of the Land
Her book massively influential, but rejected for tenure; sued the
University for sexism and antisemitism and won a large settlement
o Kolodnys assertion: that early American settlers saw the landscape as female, endowed
with a womb, female sexuality, and so on; a series of metaphorical patterns in history
Kolodys focus on early America crucial; accounts of the new landscape by
British colonists; an era of colonization, settlement, nation-building
Assertion that this way of thinking is foundational; idea, namely, that
the idea of the landscape as having a womb shaped national character
Turner and the Frontier: experience at the edge of the wave on westward
moving lines of contact made American-ness, Americas exceptional qualities
Educational experience of learning how to be American experienced
by settlers, the teacher being the feminine American west
Ascription of feminine characteristics to the land in Kolodnys study
o Landscape as the total female principle of gratification: the souls home, from which
and in which the individual can never experience exile, alienation
Unalienated labor: intimate connection to the land as opposed to Marxist
concept of an industrialized labor process inducing alienation
Synchronicity between landscape and settler; imagination that it is the
will of the landscape itself to produce along with the settler
o Treasures having not yet been opened; paradise with all her virgin beauties
Fetishizing of first-ness, placing settlers in a position of primacy in the new
world; also eliding indigenous presence beforehand
Discourse of waste, use-value: land misused, wasted by indigenes;
suggestion that land is meant to be used to maximum production
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