Until the end of days: narrating landscape and environment

Abstract

Once upon a time geographers had little room for narrative. To be sure many wrote narratives, unselfconsciously, to describe processes of change, but few reflected on, or analysed, the nature and value of narrative as a form of exposition or interpretation. When they did so, in mid-20th century Anglophone geography, narrative appeared a problem in positioning geography as a discipline, both too powerful a method and too powerless. As a conventional mode of history, narrative appeared to over-ride spatial or visual frameworks of interpretation, which led H. C. Darby to identify some interesting experiments in geographical description, cross-sections, mixtures of past and present tense, 'retrospective asides' and 'flash-backs'. 1 Endorsing positivist views of causality, David Harvey found narrative a weak method for geography, at best a preliminary verbal sketch to be filled out through more powerful, quantitative models of temporal explanation. 2 If we plot human geography's story as a paradigm shift into a post-positivist period from the late 1970s, those who made room for narrative did so from a variety of positions, humanist, realist, marxist, post-modernist, and the many combinations thereof. 3 Most familiarized themselves with a wider, inter-disciplinary narratological turn in the arts and social sciences, coming from literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and particularly a widely influential hermeneutic and historiographical strain in philosophy, notably in canonical works by Paul Ricouer, Hayden White and Louis Mink. While narratology addressed a radical, structuralist suspicion of narrative, its rhetorical power to offer a mystifyingly false coherence and closure to events, it also sought to redeem narrative as a theoretically powerful and complicated form of explanation, a precise cognitive instrument, taking many forms, genres, tropes, tenses, including various kinds of storytelling. 4 Moreover narrative not only focussed on understanding the past, but also framed the present and future, a relay of retrospect and prospect. The model of explanation itself was widened to include various modes of cultural interpretation, understanding and description, contextual, creative modes of making and meaning displacing naturalistic modes of causality. The sequential passing of time was configured synoptically, even spatially, such that period and place were brought into closer conceptual conjunction, the plot, and emplotment, as a matter of both locating and telling, of creating situated stories.The recuperation of narrative in human geography was upheld as a way of connecting, or reconnecting, conceptual polarities such as idiographic/nomothetic, analysis/synthesis and agency/ structure, and connecting other polarities which had seldom hitherto been recognized as a

Eye‐opener: Drawing landscape near and far

“…Beyond the widespread example of walking (see for instance Ingold & Vergunst, ; Macpherson, ; Wylie, ), these include landscape practices and mobilities as diverse as angling, cycling, climbing, running, swimming, scuba‐diving, writing and train travel (Barratt, ; Bissell, ; Brace & Johns‐Putra, ; Cidell, ; Eden & Bear, ; Foley, ; Rickly, ; Spinney, ; Straughan, ; Watts, ). Landscape has also in the past 10 years become a distinctive venue for reflections on memory, change, narrative, spirituality and therapy (e.g., Conradson, ; Daniels & Lorimer, ; DeSilvey, ; Dewsbury & Cloke, ; Pearson, ; Wylie, ). But it seemed to us, at the time we began, that the practice of painting and drawing was an omission from this lengthening list of studies, especially given the decisive associations between landscape and visual art.…”

The Art of Writing Place

“…To this end, for instance, “ ‘new nature writing’ reworks a centuries‐old literary tradition of natural description and natural history publishing. […] the signature feature of this narrative‐driven genre is a deeply personalized quality of expression, articulating anxieties about irreversible local change, nowadays in a context of resource depletion, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and atmospheric warming on a global scale” (Daniels and Lorimer , 4).…”

Towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place

“…We are undertaking a kind of visual criticism, but not one 'disciplined' by any nameable theory or methodology, treating the films as a site of research in which we are situated and implicated after watching. As in much other phenomenological landscape geography (Dubow 2001(Dubow , 2011Wylie 2002Wylie , 2005Wylie , 2007Lorimer 2003Lorimer , 2006Lorimer , 2012Edensor 2005Edensor , 2008Daniels 2006Daniels , 2012Pearson 2006;DeSilvey 2007DeSilvey , 2010DeSilvey , 2012Matless 2008Matless , 2010Matless , 2014Lorimer & Wylie 2010;Rose 2012;Riding 2015aRiding , 2015bRiding , 2016bRiding , 2017b, the films analysed here, are treated not as a spatial gaze or a representational schema, overarching and constructing the traumatised landscape, rather they are considered as presentations that are 'in and of the world' (Dewsbury et al 2002). For the films Stuart Laycock made, demand us to simultaneously tighten our point of view and widen our point of view (Didi-Huberman 2008, 41).…”