Land and Landscape

How did land—a primary source of economic value—become separated from landscape—an object of aesthetic enjoyment—in Enlightenment Europe and its colonies? This course examines the moment between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries when the physical and conceptual demarcations of land from landscape coincided with the emergence of political economic discourses, on the one hand, and the formulation of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry, on the other. Re-examining well-known moments in landscape history, the course aims to ask: What does a global modernity fueled as much by agriculturalization as by industrialization look like? How can this theoretical recalibration help construct new historical ontologies of such key concepts as nature, culture, and environment? What might this examination reveal about the vexed relationship between politics and aesthetics? And what are the historical interdependencies between economic value and aesthetic value?