ABSTRACT
Chapter three illustrates some of the general difficulties in dealing with landscapes as objects of analysis in planning and research. It points to some of the underlying causes of these difficulties as traceable in the genealogy of the concept of landscape in Western culture. Landscape emerged as symbol of the unity between humanity and nature in the wake of modernity as a way of negotiating human liminality through aesthetic engagement with the land. The pastoral idea has taken on ever new shapes through continuous interpretation and re-presentation against the background of society’s development. Accordingly, the chapter demonstrates the necessity to frame even particular landscapes within a narrative that reiterates the conditions of their emergence into appearance as perceptions-of-areas there and then. The chapter presents a particular Norwegian landscape narrative as a conventional pastoral motif, which, treated analytically, revealed new insight to its author at the time of its narration. The chapter shows that analytical narratives must expose a discrepancy between a positive ideal and a currently active threat to it (a negative ideal), which causes an area to emerge into appearance as presently relevant landscape.
