Ecocriticism Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rick Van Noy

Critical Essay by Rick Van Noy

SOURCE: Van Noy, Rick. “Surveying the Sublime: Literary Cartographers and the Spirit of Place.” In The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, edited by Steven Rosendale, pp. 181‐204. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Van Noy presents the work of three mappers—Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell—as representing various nineteenth‐century responses to the spirit of the western landscape.

One of the curiosities of the literature of American surveying and mapping is its reliance on the sublime. Since the sublime is concerned with an aesthetic and emotional response and surveying with a scientific one, the two would seem to be in conflict. The sublime deals with measureless emotion, while surveying precisely measures. The sublime implies something beneath the threshold of experience, what can't be mapped or limned. Yet when surveyors Henry David Thoreau and the first two directors of the...
(read more)