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Wow, that’s acidic!

My previous post, or rather essay, got sidetracked quite a bit, yet it touched on the issue I wanted to cover, more or less, even though my intention was not to examine passports. Somehow I managed to be unaware of the new expanded edition of ‘Landscape and Englishness’ by David Matless that came out in […]

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Getting carded

In his book simply titled ‘Landscape’ John Wylie (117) characterizes understanding of landscape as discussed by David Matless concisely not as a matter of property, but propriety, more specifically “as a matter of conduct and forms of ‘proper’ bodily display and performance.” It is not that the ownership of land and its connection to landscape […]

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Ketchup on a steak?

In an early article dating back to the early 1970s, James Duncan addresses landscape and taste in his ‘Landscape Taste as a Symbol of Group Identity: A Westchester County Village’. As indicated in the title, Duncan focuses on a rural landscape, a village located in the town of Bedford, in Westchester County, New York. He […]

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Talking the talk, walking the walk

The second part of the article titled ‘Representation and videography in linguistic landscape studies’ by Robert Troyer and Tamás Szabó covers videography as an alternative to photography. That said, I must point out that the authors do not assert that the two are mutually exclusive. In fact they (62) note that still photos may be […]

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3D in 2D, typically in 3:2

I planned not delving into discussing linguistic landscape (LL) studies at this stage. Anyway, as I’ve been more or less focusing on representation in landscape research, I felt that a recently published article titled ‘Representation and videography in linguistic landscape studies’ would fit in the mix just fine. As the title suggests authors Robert Troyer […]

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Space: the primal frontier

The topic has been set on representation recently and I already once alluded to someone whose work I should comment on. That someone is Henri Lefebvre, whose understanding of space will be elaborated this time. In his ‘La production de l’espace’, he argues for understanding space as socially produced. Condensing the some 450 pages here […]

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Why am I impressed?

Denis Cosgrove provides us some of the finest reading (no pun intended) on landscapes. One should take a look at his work on landscape and representation, namely his major works: the ‘Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape’ and ‘The Palladian Landscape’. By no means is his work limited to the said works, but those are the […]

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Different vintage, same quality

Maurice Ronai picks up where he left with his follow up to his earlier article ‘Paysages’. Appearing in the same journal, the author sticks to the short titles, opting for ‘Paysages. II’ this time. Unsurprisingly, he reiterates some of the key insights from the previous landscape article. These need not be repeated, so I will […]

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More of that fine French vintage please

Maurice Ronai covers various aspects of landscape in his plainly titled article ‘Paysages’. He addresses landscape through ‘géoscopie’ (126-133), ‘géographie’ (133-139), ‘géosémie’ (139-153) and ‘géophilie’ (153-159). Ronai also discusses space, a related concept, and what is understood as the objective reality is referred to as the real or real space. The first part on ‘géoscopie’ […]

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How about something French?

In ‘La forêt loisir, un équipement de pouvoir: L’exemple de la forêt de Fontainebleau’, Bernard Kalaora and Valentin Pelosse discuss forests as landscapes. They use the Fontainebleau forest, a national park located southeast of Paris, as an example. They (92) start by pointing out that when one is situated in a forest, one does not […]