Observation Points

<div> <p>National parks are the places that present ideas of nature to Americans: Zion Yosemite Grand Canyon Yellowstone bring to mind quintessential and awe-inspiring wilderness. By examining how rhetoric-particularly visual rhetoric-has worked to shape our views of nature and the natural place of humans <i>Observation Points</i> offers insights into questions of representation including the formation of national identity.</p> <p>As Thomas Patin reveals the term nature is artificial and unstable in need of constant maintenance and reconstruction. The process of stabilizing its representation he notes is unavoidably political. America's national parks and monuments show how visual rhetoric operates to naturalize and stabilize representations of the environment. As contributors demonstrate visual rhetoric is often transparent structuring experience while remaining hidden in plain sight. Scenic overlooks and turnouts frame views for tourists. Visitor centers with their display cases and photographs and orientation films provide their own points of view-literally and figuratively. Guidebooks brochures and other publications present still other ways of seeing. At the same time images of America's natural world have long been employed for nationalist and capitalist ends linking expansionism with American greatness and the natural triumph of European Americans over Native Americans.</p> <p>The essays collected here cover a wide array of subjects including park architecture landscape painting public ceremonies and techniques of display. Contributors are from an equally broad range of disciplines-art history geography museum studies political science American studies and many other fields. Together they advance a provocative new visual genealogy of representation.</p> <p>Contributors: Robert M. Bednar Southwestern U Georgetown Texas; Teresa Bergman U of the Pacific; Albert Boime UCLA; William Chaloupka Colorado State U; Gregory Clark Brigham Young U; Stephen Germic Rocky Mountain College; Gareth John St. Cloud State U Minnesota; Mark Neumann Northern Arizona U; Peter Peters Maastricht U; Cindy Spurlock Appalachian State U; David A. Tschida U of Wisconsin Eau Claire; Sabine Wilke U of Washington.<br></p> </div>