Writing Landscape: An Inter-Disciplinary Symposium for Scholars in the Arts and Humanities

摘要

In March 2007, the first of a three-session conference, "Writing Landscape: An Inter-disciplinary Symposium for Scholars in the Arts and Humanities," gathered in London to explore "the relationship between landscape and creative writing." The audience was made up, for the most part, of academics from the disciplines of geography and English literature from the University of Exeter in Cornwall, a number of garden historians from London and Iceland, and one landscape architect from Norway rounded out the audience. Supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and organized by Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra of the University of Exeter, the conference actually demonstrated the frequently-stated need for disciplines to learn from each other. Specifically, it suggested that geographers could benefit from the theoretical sophistication of literary academics, while literary critics could benefit from an expansion of their field. On the one hand, several participants remarked that the geographers seemed two centuries behind the times in theoretical matters. On the other, the literary scholars shone at theory—in part because their sources were themselves concerned with theoretical issues—but these sources all too frequently seemed limited to the Romantic poets. Would we be stuck, all day long, in the intellectual milieu of, say, 1807?