Scripting the Wilderness

Year 2009, Issue: 30, 57 - 72, 01.10.2009

Wendy Harding

Abstract

The literature of place poses the problem of writing about what is beyond the self—and therefore beyond the immediate range of human experience— through the filter of human consciousness. This conundrum is most acutely felt in writing about wilderness, which, in the context of American culture, is generally conceived of as “an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”1 The perplexity of the writer faced with the challenge of writing about a place where, by definition, he does not belong can be felt in the title of Don Scheese’s essay “The Inhabited Wilderness.” This brief text about a hike into Hammond Canyon in Utah shows how a particular writer responds to the challenge; at the same time, it challenges readers to find ways of responding to texts about place, a genre to which the usual critical methods are not adapted.2 The present study offers a close reading of Scheese’s “The Inhabited Wilderness” as an example of a new interpretative model designed to respond to the literature of place.3 Like others of its genre this text departs from a prior experience that is personal and irrecoverable and creates a new literary space made of words. The text is a montage of what I call “scripts” proposing different responses to and interpretations of the land.

References

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• ---. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. 1996; London: Routledge, 2002.
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