Geography and vision: Denis Cosgrove, 1948 - 2008

摘要

Denis Cosgrove was not only one of the best-known geographers of our times, he was also one of the most highly regarded, by critics as well as friends. His writings have had a significant impact within a variety of disciplines in many parts of the world over the last three decades. His work on landscape shaped the ideas of a generation of scholars in geography and landscape architecture; his historical and contemporary writings on the arts of mapping helped to breathe new life into the history of cartography; and his research on images of the globe in the Western tradition is today widely regarded as an indispensable reference point for debates over environmentalism, globalism, and the geographical imagination. Above all, as has been recognized in the published obituaries, Denis Cosgrove was one of the leading spirits in the revival of the humanities tradition within the discipline of geography during the closing decades of the 20th century (Anon, 2008a; 2008b; Lowenthal, 2008a). Like Edward Said, his relationship to the Western humanist tradition was both critical and contradictory: not for him the tidy ethics of the 'posthumanist' turn. The humanities provided for Cosgrove a congenial setting for a succession of ever-larger inquiries into the making of geographical experience-the embodied and imaginative encounter with places, landscapes, and ultimately with the whole earth.