Overview

"National parks are the places that present ideas of nature to Americans: Zion, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone bring to mind quintessential and awe-inspiring wilderness. By examining how rhetoric-particularly visual rhetoric-has worked to shape our views of nature and the ""natural"" place of humans, Observation Points offers insights into questions of representation, including the formation of national identity. As Thomas Patin reveals, the term ""nature"" is artificial and unstable, in need of constant maintenance and reconstruction. The process of stabilizing its representation, he notes, is unavoidably political. America's national parks and monuments show how visual rhetoric operates to naturalize and stabilize representations of the environment. As contributors demonstrate, visual rhetoric is often transparent, structuring experience while remaining hidden in plain sight. Scenic overlooks and turnouts frame views for tourists. Visitor centers, with their display cases and photographs and orientation films, provide their own points of view-literally and figuratively. Guidebooks, brochures, and other publications present still other ways of seeing. At the same time, images of America's ""natural"" world have long been employed for nationalist and capitalist ends, linking expansionism with American greatness and the ""natural"" triumph of European Americans over Native Americans. The essays collected here cover a wide array of subjects, including park architecture, landscape painting, public ceremonies, and techniques of display. Contributors are from an equally broad range of disciplines-art history, geography, museum studies, political science, American studies, and many other fields. Together they advance a provocative new visual genealogy of representation. Contributors: Robert M. Bednar, Southwestern U, Georgetown, Texas; Teresa Bergman, U of the Pacific; Albert Boime, UCLA; William Chaloupka, Colorado State U; Gregory Clark, Brigham Young U; Stephen Germic, Rocky Mountain College; Gareth John, St. Cloud State U, Minnesota; Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona U; Peter Peters, Maastricht U; Cindy Spurlock, Appalachian State U; David A. Tschida, U of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; Sabine Wilke, U of Washington."

Full Product Details

Author:   Thomas Patin ,  Robert M. Bednar ,  Teresa Bergman ,  Albert Boime
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.517kg
ISBN:  

9780816651467

ISBN 10:   0816651469
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   04 April 2012
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Contents Introduction: Naturalizing Rhetoric Thomas Patin 1. Being Here, Looking There: Mediating Vistas in the National Parks of the Contemporary American West Robert M. Bednar 2. Remembering Zion: Architectural Encounters in a National Park Gregory Clark 3. Roadside Wilderness: U.S. National Park Design in the 1950s and 1960s Peter Peters 4. Critical Vehicles Crash the Scene: Spectacular Nature and Popular Spectacle at the Grand Canyon Mark Neumann 5. How German Is the American West? The Legacy of Caspar David Friedrich’s Visual Poetics in American Landscape Painting Sabine Wilke 6. Yellowstone National Park in Metaphor: Place and Actor Representations in Visitor Publications David A. Tschida 7. Image/Text/Geography: Yellowstone and the Spatial Rhetoric of Landscape Gareth John 8. Can Patriotism Be Carved in Stone? A Critical Analysis of Mount Rushmore’s Orientation Films Teresa Bergman 9. Thinking like a Mountain: Mount Rushmore’s Gaze William Chaloupka 10. George Catlin’s Wilderness Utopia Albert Boime 11. Memorials and Mourning: Recovering Native Resistance in and to the Monuments of the Nation Stephen Germic 12. America’s Best Idea: Environmental Public Memory and the Rhetoric of Conservation Civics Cindy Spurlock 13. America in Ruins: Parks, Poetics, and Politics Thomas Patin Contributors Index

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Author Information

Thomas Patin is professor of art history and director of the School of Art at Northern Arizona University.

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