Miller (1995) - Topographies
From Inventiopedia
Miller, J. Hillis (1995) Topographies. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
This is a book about literary analysis which takes topography as a central concept - although it seems in part to be meant metaphorically, in part literally. Miller is a deconstructionist, and criticizes Heidegger's concepts of 'building' and 'dwelling'. He also asserts that literary texts which talk about given places/landscapes are not simply based on the landscapes, they also contribute to the constructions of the landscapes as human environments:
Novels themselves aid in making the landscapes that they apparently presuppose as already made and finished. Mississippi is partly what it is because of Faulkner's Yoknopatawpha novels. Dorset has been made what it is in part by way of Hardy's Wessex, Salisbury by way of Trollope's Barset novels, London by Dickens, Paris by Balzac and Proust, and so on. (p. 16)
The process whereby meanings are projected on the landscape may be easier to see in novels that obey unity of place. It may be easiest of all when the novelist has produced a map of the imaginary country of his novels. This map records a transformation of the real landscape effected by writing the novels. [...] The map may seem to show what is presupposed by the action of the novel, but in fact it is the product of the novel and impossible without it. The map is what remains after the characters are dead or happily married, like a tumulus or like a house with its gardens, fences, and paths, which have been gradually produced by the family living there. [...] The landscape is not a pre-existing thing in itself. It is made into a landscape, that is, into a humanly menaningful space, by the living that takes place within it. This transforms it both materially, as by names, or spiritually, as by the ascription of some collective value to this or that spot. We say, for example, «This is Hart-Leap Well», and this speech act memorializes for generations an event that occurred there. Among such transformations making the brute X-ignotum ['X-unknown'] of the earth (if that is what it is) into a human landscape are the making of a map or of a picture, the telling of a story, the writing of a novel located at that place. [...] The landscape exists as landscape only when it has been made human in an activity of inhabitation that the writing of the novel repeats or prolongs. (p. 20)
The essential differences between Hardy and Heidegger can be briefly stated. Heidegger is beguiled by the dream of a harmonious and unified culture, a culture rooted in one particular place. Hardy knows, and shows in his novels, that such an apparent unity, even in rural cultures, is riven by divisions and disharmonies. (...) Heidegger is confident that proper building and dwelling can bring Being into presence, perform an act of «aletheia» or uncovering, while for Hardy anything present, visible, out in the sunlight, is only another sign for a permanent absence.
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 20:25, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
