Rethinking setting: Representing landscape in southern Alberta literature (Thomas King, Peter Oliva, Sid Marty, Christopher Manes, David Abram).

摘要

This thesis explores the problematics inherent in representing the landscape's expressive and influential aspects in literature. As Christopher Manes notes in "Nature and Silence," "Nature is silent in our culture," and this silence is mirrored in many of the literary representations of landscape that our culture produces (15). Implicated in this restrictive representational bias are limitations in the written form that writers employ in their depictions of landscape, as well as formative elements of current non-aboriginal ideology that govern our relationship with and understanding of landscape. However, as David Abram suggests in The Spell of the Sensuous, the non-human members of the surrounding landscape are engaged in a continuous, reciprocal, and influential relationship with us, whether we perceive it or not. Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, Peter Oliva's Drowning in Darkness, and Sid Marty's Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook are three texts that manoeuvre within and challenge the ideological and written constraints of their mode of representation to portray the southern Alberta landscape as more than just a static and mute setting for human actions.