A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Romancing the Desert: Landscape and Ideology in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop depicts the process through which individual perception distorts a previously inscribed landscape. Cather’s portrayals of the Southwest articulate the Euro-American wish to transform an unfamiliar landscape and culture into a blank space onto which desires for mastery can be projected and ultimately fulfilled. The idea of the closure of the frontier as a defined spatial category allowed romanticized imaginings to abound; as Mary Lawlor argues in Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West, “writers and artists across the social spectrum found in the topic of the vanished ‘wilderness’ an opportunity to memorialize the open-endedness, the sense of possibility of what was now regarded as a storied zone of adventure” (1). Throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour engages in the process of memorializing this “adventure zone” both concretely, through construction of the cathedral and his cultivation of gardens, and ideologically, with the dictation of “truths and fancies” about the New Mexican diocese to his young disciple. Latour’s myth-making remaps the landscape with a Euro-American spirituality, becoming the palimpsest under which traces of indigenous history and layers of empire can be unearthed.
Romancing the Desert: Landscape and Ideology in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop depicts the process through which individual perception distorts a previously inscribed landscape. Cather’s portrayals of the Southwest articulate the Euro-American wish to transform an unfamiliar landscape and culture into a blank space onto which desires for mastery can be projected and ultimately fulfilled. The idea of the closure of the frontier as a defined spatial category allowed romanticized imaginings to abound; as Mary Lawlor argues in Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West, “writers and artists across the social spectrum found in the topic of the vanished ‘wilderness’ an opportunity to memorialize the open-endedness, the sense of possibility of what was now regarded as a storied zone of adventure” (1). Throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour engages in the process of memorializing this “adventure zone” both concretely, through construction of the cathedral and his cultivation of gardens, and ideologically, with the dictation of “truths and fancies” about the New Mexican diocese to his young disciple. Latour’s myth-making remaps the landscape with a Euro-American spirituality, becoming the palimpsest under which traces of indigenous history and layers of empire can be unearthed.
Romancing the Desert: Landscape and Ideology in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
Williams, Julie (author)
2011-11-27
Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature; Vol. 2 No. 1 (2011): Walking Around in the Space of Consumption and Segregation: Examining Place in Language and Literature; 11-26 ; 2161-0010
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
DDC:
710
Romancing the Desert: Landscape and Ideology in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
| BASE | 2011
Selective Disclosure: Romancing the Singapore River
| British Library Conference Proceedings | 2003
Romancing the high-rise in Singapore
Online Contents | 2005
Romancing the high-rise in Singapore
| Elsevier | 2004
Willa Tezeusza w Nea Pafos : rezydencja antyczna
| TIBKAT | 1992