Search Results

This chapter and the next explore the relationship between the concepts of God and of place. This enquiry is designed to provide a theoretical basis for the thought that knowledge of God will be analogous to knowledge of place. Chapter 3 considers the idea that both God and places have a supra-individual mode of existence, and the idea that knowledge of God is like the knowledge of a genius loci, where the relevant locus is the sum of material reality. This chapter also considers the relationship between a place-based understanding of the idea of divine supra-individuality and Aquinas's account of God as subsistent existence.

This chapter further develops the framework of CLUE with a consolidated discussion of five use cases presented earlier. It situates those cases on a broader horizon and reviews the trends of user localization across the sites. Thereby it illuminates how a holistic view of user experience is both situated and constructed in local contexts: To explore the “situatedness,” the first section of the chapter looks at how a local use of mobile messaging technology is situated in the surrounding contexts as the outcome of the interactions of various cultural influences; to investigate the “constructiveness,” the second section demonstrates how user localization functions as cultural consumption and how “genius loci” is achieved. Based on this holistic view of user experience, the third section examines affordances as dialogic relation through a dual mediation process of messaging use and suggests designing beyond operational affordances and cultivating social affordances for local use.

Widely attested in Indic, Greek, and Celtic literature, mythic accounts of a fraught encounter between a hero together with a group of human “brothers” and the shape-shifting genius loci of a sylvan lucus—either a body of placid water or a forest grove—have two principal variants. When that dæmon is male, he tests the humans with riddles that they are required to answer at the peril of their lives. When the dæmon is female, she is often cast as the sister or surrogate of the male genius loci. Overcome by the cunning, force, beauty or goodness of the hero, she betrays her brother and gives herself up, often sexually, to the hero. This latter variant frequently overlaps with Indo-European myths concerning the winning of female Sovereignty, embodied in a goddess who first appears to the hero in a horrific form and threatens his life. The former variant, in which the genius loci is male, may be reflective of an ancient ritual complex involving riddles posed by a dæmon to humans trespassing its lucus, or, as in the case of the Greco-Roman world, questions posed by humans to a dæmon oracle.

The question of how space becomes place, through human experience and imagination, has for some time occupied scholars of diverse disciplines. This book pursues the further religious question of how places have acquired hallowed or spirit-bearing meaning throughout the course of American literary history—not only in Christian or semipantheistic terms but as outgrowths of the ancient Roman principle of a site’s genius loci. After an opening chapter devoted to representations of home places, commentary proceeds to a chapter devoted to resettlement and pilgrimage themes; then to an inquiry about imagination in place; then to a literary-steeped sampling of diverse American sites and landforms; and finally to a consideration of how place-making and site-based learning might figure in collegiate educational programs. Along the way, this book’s spirit-of-place readings range across texts by canonical figures such as Thoreau, Stowe, Cather, and Wendell Berry as well as an array of lesser-known writers.

The Romans loved their dragons (dracones, serpentes). Their narratives of the great dragon fights of Greek myth are more expansive, more detailed, and richer than any earlier accounts on the Greek side itself. These narratives typically focalize large parts of their accounts of the fights through the figure of the dragon himself, who is often anthropomorphized, endowed with a feisty personality and with the dignity and nobility of a warrior, and treated with a certain degree of sympathy. Paradoxically, the Romans had little interest in developing new dragon-traditions of their own. The single significant exception is the tale of the Dragon of the river Bagrada, which is defeated by distinctively Roman means, namely by their army with its ballistas. But the Roman world was full of the imagery of kindly dragons, including the genii loci that embellished every home.

This chapter discusses the importance of landscape painting in the formation of early twentieth-century Canadian national identity, in particular the Theosophical aspirations and quest for the genius loci of the Group of Seven painters in Ontario, and Emily Carr in British Columbia. Jeff Wall’s published texts that describe the influence of Carr on his peers’ work, and their desire to work outside of the problematic of colonialism, necessitates this examination. Historian Lorenzo Veracini’s discussions of the many narratives utilized by settler colonial societies to authenticate and rationalize their rights to indigenous land are introduced in relationship to the discursive framing of texts that supported and documented Lawren Harris and Carr’s paintings. The national and regional legacy of spiritually-infused landscape painting was antithetical to young artists and intellectuals like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who came to maturity in the late 1960s, and who were committed to revealing man’s alienation from his industrial environment through Marxist-informed critiques of capitalism.

The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971) emphasises connections between the body and the country estate. These links are brutal: the estate’s grounds have been landscaped and its outlying fields are cultivated, but they in turn seem to affect a figure in the landscape. The protagonist Leo emerges as a new, human incarnation of the genius loci of the picturesque tradition: he performs within the landscape, while he himself is branded by it. Attempting to make sense of how he has been traumatised, Leo struggles with the aesthetic mystification that cloaks the estate’s power relations. In order to contextualise The Go-Between’s complex landscaping, this chapter combines close analysis with cross-disciplinary landscape history. It traces the film’s roots from the emergence of a new discourse about the picturesque in the 1920s, through the psychogeography of L.P. Hartley’s original novel, to Losey’s pioneering approach to filming a country estate for The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958). It considers how this approach was developed for The Go-Between, which set a precedent for the representation of estates on screen. The chapter ultimately points to parallels between The Go-Between and the revisionist landscape historiography that rose to prominence during the 1970s.

In his introduction to a selection of verse and prose by John Betjeman, Slick but not Streamlined (1947), W. H. Auden attempted to define ‘topophilia’, a particular kind of attachment to landscape and environment which, he said, suffused Betjeman’s writings. ‘Topophilia’, he wrote, has little in common with nature love. Wild or unhumanised nature holds no charms for the average topophil because it is lacking in history; (the exception which proves the rule is the geological topophil). At the same time, though history manifested by objects is essential, the quantity of the history and the quality of the object are irrelevant; a branch railroad is as valuable as a Roman wall, a neo-Tudor teashop as interesting as a Gothic cathedral. Auden regrets (disingenuously, perhaps) that he himself is ‘too short-sighted, too much of a Thinking Type, to attempt this sort of poetry, which requires a strongly visual imagination’. It is a particular brand of literary topophilia, typified by Betjeman, that Auden discusses; but broadly defined it is a far more widespread sensibility in British culture. Requiring not only a visual imagination, but also a wilfully parochial outlook and a reluctance to engage with the homogenizing forces of urban modernity, a topophilia of one sort or another was characteristic of a whole generation of artists and writers in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. This topophilia is not the same as a love of the countryside, as Auden points out, although that is what it might sometimes be mistaken for. What unites these ‘topophils’ is an interest, sometimes amounting to an obsession, with local landscapes marked by time, places where the past is tangible. For some, such as Betjeman, John Piper, and Geoffrey Grigson, this topophilia—as Auden suggests— is eclectic, including medieval churches, Gothic and mock Gothic architecture, Regency terraces and ancient sites. Some topophils of this generation, such as Paul Nash with his fascination with the genius loci, made atmospheric prehistoric landscapes a particular focus. Others, like painter Graham Sutherland, were attracted towards scarred nature and geological vistas. In the Four Quartets T. S. Eliot looked for redemption and history in an English village: ‘History is now and England’.

Cultural landscapes are the combined works of man and nature and it is only by studying this dynamic interaction that the essence of the resulting cultural landscapes can be fully appreciated and valued. Differences and similarities between western and eastern perceptions and artistic expressions of landscape are discussed to establish the cultural values that underpin our understanding and interpretation of the natural and built world. The way by which the cultural landscape concept attained international recognition as a more holistic approach to define and interpret heritage sites is outlined. World Heritage definitions of the different categories of cultural landscape, namely, designed, organically evolved, and associative, are described using examples inscribed on the World Heritage List. Examples of equivalent categories of cultural landscapes in Hong Kong are then presented to introduce the concept and, for the first time, highlight their heritage value.

Rudyard Kipling’s stories for children Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies were first published in 1906 and 1909–10 respectively. In these stories, Puck (Shakespeare’s Puck of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and the last ‘fairy’ to survive in England) meets two children, Dan and Una, in the Sussex countryside where they live in the early twentieth century. Puck introduces the children to various historical characters—a Roman Centurion, a Norman Knight, and so on—who tell them stories about the past, and in particular the history of their locality. In these stories it is the land itself that is the bearer of historical meaning, as revealed by Puck and these messengers from the past. Indeed, time and space are seen to be inseparable, since a place and its features are often literally constituted by what has happened there. ‘Puck’s Song’, the opening poem of Puck of Pook’s Hill, makes this connection plain:… See you the dimpled track that runs, All hollow through the wheat? O that was where they hauled the guns That smote King Philip’s fleet . . . Puck reveals to the children the antiquity of some of the landscape’s features:… See you our little mill that clacks, So busy by the brook? She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Domesday Book…. Sometimes it is a past that has left no trace that Puck restores, through storytelling, to the landscape:… See you our pastures wide and lone, Where the red oxen browse? O there was a City thronged and known Ere London boasted a house…. Puck, who is thousands of years old (‘the oldest Old Thing in England’), is the witness of the history of the British Isles since ‘Stonehenge was new’, and has an epic memory. All of history is available to him, both impossibly distant yet immediately present in his mind, as it is in the landscape he inhabits, which bears the marks of the past. The figure of Puck is a literary device through which Kipling could liberate himself from the limitations of written history, for within the frame of the stories, Puck’s testimony as the witness of time—however fanciful—is indisputable.