특집 : 공간의 텍스트성과 영문학 ; 문화지리학의 경관 연구와 경관의 텍스트성

Landscape is one of the “hottest” keywords in social sciences and humanities. It has long been studied in many fields such as visual art, landscape architecture, environmentology and earth sciences literature. At the same time, it has been a focus of geography``s engagement with the humanities. The term “landscape” generally means everything you can see when you look across an area of land, including mountains, rivers, buildings, and trees, But in geography it has been defined as an appearance of an area made up of a distinact association of forms. The pioneer of American cultural geography Carl Sauer, who was influenced by German geographers such as the “Landshaft School,” introduced the concept of “cultural landscape” and regarded landscape as an area composed of distinct association of forms. In the late 1970s, the “New Cultural Geographers” challenged the traditional concept of landscape. Denis Cosgrove defined “a landscape as “a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolizing surroundings.” Under this view, many cultural geographers have studied landscape as “a way of seeing” and analysed visual descriptions of landscape in painting , photography and film. On the other hand, a number of geographers have also developed a text metaphor of landscape as shown in The City as Text by James Duncan. Duncan insisted that we have to read landscape represented in various texts. Although landscape is representation of texts as he said, it also represents reality at the same time. Since the 1990s, cultural geographers have paid attention to “politics of place,” and they have emphasized that landscapes are social products. So we have to examine how some (dominant) people create, (re)present, and interpret landscape based on their own power relationships. Gillian Rose thought that traditional landscape studies in geography were involved in a masculinist way of seeing. Don Mitchell was worried that recent landscape studies were only concerned with representations in images and texts. Landscape is not only a symbolic process but also a material and ideological process. This is the reason why we have to explore this interesting concept by employing both literature and geography, the humanities and social science.