UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Prologue in the wilderness

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.4324/9780203432501-8

Auteurs

Monika Fludernik

Année déclarée

2002

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

book-chapter

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:17:20.976698+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:17:20.976698+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Stephen Greenblatt's humorous anecdote about a trip to Yosemite National Park provides a perfect illustration of some of the issues with which I will be dealing in this book, while at the same time marking a limit to my own enquiry into fiction and the novel. Where Greenblatt's story serves as an exemplum of the ideology of representation and opens up into an analysis of the capitalist underpinnings of the supposedly `natural', my own enquiry will be directed towards narration, narrativity and nationality, with the question of ideological underpinnings relegated to the horizons of the analysis. It is my contention that, paradoxically, we still know much too little about narrative to indulge in any easy generalizations about its commitments to, and ensnarements by, its political, societal and ideological embedding. At the same time, I maintain, it is only in the light of recent deconstructivist, Lacanian and New Historicist insights into the workings of the symbolic that one could dare tackle the concept of the natural in both its complexity and intrinsic paradoxically. No immediate access to the natural nor a naïve reduction of the natural to pure undiluted Otherness can any longer claim legitimacy so that a theoretical approach that exploits the concept of the natural needs to clarify its own position from the very start. Like Baudrillard's America, Greenblatt's Yosemite Park appears to the eyes of the beholder as a structure of signs that traces a significant trajectory and culminates in a paradoxical deconstruction of these signs' canvassed meaning. The hypothetical nature enthusiast follows the officially designed trail of signifiers to their ever denser and allegedly epiphanic source only to find, with the reader, that the promised reward, on reaching the destination of the visitor's semiotic quest, deconstructs itself by symbolic overkill. The natural quite brazenly displays itself as a mere representation of the real thing which, across the abyss, continues to haunt the quester's imagination and eludes the grasp of the explorer. In this tale of frustrated mastery over the symbolic `other' the natural thus operates both as the prime signifier and the elusive signified. Its function can be compared to that of the textual `real' in the realist novel with its paradoxical relation to the `Real' of human cognition. Greenblatt's anecdote not only illustrates the short-circuit of signification in the symbolic code which keeps projecting an imaginary other but fails to grasp the Real; it additionally mirrors the perplexities of fictional writing, of trying to constitute an imaginary world, which is the `real' world in yet a different shape. Greenblatt's `exemplary fable', like the fictional detail in Barthes's arguments about the effet de réel, attests to the trustworthiness of its own discourse. Not only is this an anecdote about the effects of the real in the guise of the natural; the story of this trip, generalized and ahistorical as it may be, additionally invites the reader's active collusion so that she comes to share the various facets of the experience apostrophized in the fable. This applies no doubt most forcefully to those numerous readers who can compare Greenblatt's narrative description with their own personal experience of visiting the Nevada Falls Trail.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W3004500161

DOI

10.4324/9780203432501-8

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Chapitre d’ouvrage

Types déclarés par les sources

book-chapter

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Description bibliographique du livre

Disponibilité non établie

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203432501-8
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W3004500161

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

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