ABSTRACT

For many years, in a course entitled “The Imagined Landscape,” Thomas Looker has encouraged undergraduates to become more self-conscious about their deepest assumptions concerning the nature of Nature. Examples from classic American literature demonstrate the way immensely attractive metaphors of balance, harmony, and order, “tamed” earlier, more ambivalent images of “the howling wilderness,” the predatory frontier, and so forth. Today, however, a powerful dissonance has arisen between older imaginings of Nature and newer perspectives—arising out of contemporary science—that see the natural landscape as a space defined by probabilities rather than certainties, in which Nature often acts randomly and capriciously instead of harmoniously and predictably. Quite often, these “mixed metaphors” compete within the mind of the same individual, or within the programs of the same organization or institution.