Theoretical, historical cultural, and aesthetic issues

When John Locke stated in 1689, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” he evoked at least two ideas that would become foundational narratives in the American mindset of the nineteenth century: land and the promise, indeed prerogative, of expansion. The land, in particular the wilderness, was seen as evidence of God’s divine blessing on the new world and the source of America’s exceptionalism. At the same time, the taming of the continent and the settling of the American west was understood as a divinely sanctioned event—as the nation’s manifest destiny—and to not do so would be to waste the bounty God had given the nation. But what did it mean to enact progress within and upon the sacred and unedited manuscript from God? How could artists resolve the dilemma of being nature’s nation? The so-called ravages of the axe, as Thomas Cole and others cautioned, were quickly laying waste to the New Eden and to the very sources of America’s exceptionalism. Discuss American landscape art as fraught territory in which competing narratives, ideologies, and desires about progress and civilization were enacted. Be sure to address the readings as well as images.