Contenu du sommaire : Le paysage américain.

Henry D. Thoreau s Intermediate Landscape. For the sake of his survival economy, Thoreau transforms the ordinary landscape of the Concord Woods into a significant scenery and tries to make believe in an adventure on the Frontier. He is in fact becoming more deeply rooted in his native land and arranging a narcissistic place for withdrawal and expansion. The minute description of the protective landscape of Walden Pond adopts the naturalist's as well as the transcen- dentalist man of letters' visions to create an intermediate space which effects the transition between diverse realities, inner and external, past and present, worldly and spiritual. This natural container, which drives and reduces tensions, helps Thoreau restore a good image of himself. It allows him to offer the model of an ideal life, out of society, in this paradoxical intermediate space which reconciles primeval nature and culture.

The settings of Henry James, and other examples of his discourse of nature, such as his literary criticism of the settings of other writers and his autobiographical descriptions of place, are most intelligibly to be understood as implicit deconstructions of romantic naturalism. This intertextuality may suggest a broader one connecting Jame's writing as a whole with the entire discourse of romanticism, which may in turn suggest a way of deconstructing those environmentalist mythologies of the « land » that are so widespread in modern US culture.

Fitz Hugh Lane and the American Picturesque. Fitz Hugh Lane's Luminist paintings of Gloucester Harbor (c. 1855- 1862) are a culmination of the career of the picturesque aesthetic in America. A subtle version of the aesthetic informs four elements of Lane's style. Particularly along the harbor's Western Shore he selected forms inherently picturesque. He accentuated these forms by means of such picturesque techniques as angling, fragmentation, and chiaroscuro. He gathered the forms into panoramic compositions constructed after principles. And by means of picturesque « effect » he endowed this American landscape with an intricate array of narrative and significances, so that the very cracks in stones become stories, hieroglyphs.

The Maps of the West : History, Nature, and Derealization in the Films of the 20's. During the 20's, nearly two thousand films about the West were Rather than seeing just monotony and repetitions in them, it is more interesting to follow the diverging tracks, and to reexamine the function of landscape - with at once a return to the origins to recover a lost past, and a discovery of the country's beauty, in which the sense of movement and history then disappear. And where one has been content with postulating the existence of « photographic realism, » one discovers that derealization is a recurrent effect.

Photography of the American West : An Experimental History of the Landscape. The significant achievements of XlXth century photographers of the American landscape have recently drawn much critical attention. The esthetic revaluation of these pictures, which stems from a strong dualism (realism vs. formalism), is criticized here. Starting with an examination of some ideas of nature in the period 1830-1850, and moving on to the political and economic debate over the exploitation of the West, this article seeks to emphasize the pragmatic function of landscape in the XlXth century, and to point out the relevance of to this project, with particular respect to the dynamics of conservationism.

The New York Cityscape at the Turn of the Century in Guidebooks and Photography. Though the city of New York is changing extremely rapidly at the turn of the century, the photographs of the viewbooks show a surprisingly static and horizontal city where monumental buildings predominate, lacob Riis's photographs which expose the living conditions of the « Other Half » and reveal the urban chaos, show another side of the New York cityscape. A more composite vision of the city is gradually accepted. Urban complexity becomes a source of pride. The perception of the beauty of New York changes as the verticality of the skyscrapers becomes one of the main themes of the photographs of New York. In order to be fully appreciated, the cityscape has to be seen from a distance : the distinctive New York skyline becomes the embodiment of the New York cityscape.

The Making of The Spiral Jetty. This text is an attempt to mime, within its intertextual spiral, Robert Smithson's imaginary production of an American space, always yearned for but unattainable. How, cutting across the symbols of American culture, breaking through all limitations, he eventually singled out a place, both unnamable and quintessential, where one's American origin and death should be conjoined : Nowhere. Here. It is a kind of cenotaph, too, in honor of the land-artist who sculpted at the risk of his life so many limbos into landscapes.