A Discourse of Material, Symbolic and Emotional Change: The Rhetoric of Reclamation and the Construction of the Postmodern Sublime

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar V

Abstract

This paper examines the utilization of the sublime in our postmodern culture as exemplified by post-mining reclaimed landscapes. First the argument is presented that reclaimed landscapes are decidedly postmodern spaces, contextualized by Soja's (1996) thirdspace. These spaces, it is further argued, are defined by a rhetoric that utilizes many characteristics of a sublime discourse. The result of this material and symbolic fusion is a reification of ideologies of human dominance and wilderness devaluation.

Author

• Joshua Ewalt, University of Nebraska, Lincoln