Annual Students Conferences at Humboldt: Conferences
 
Haunted Dreams. Nightmares in American Culture


Abstracts of Papers

Philipp Kneis:
The Wilderness Masters the Colonist.
Nature, Culture, and the Truth Out There

Throughout the course of evolution and civilization, humankind has always tried to elevate herself from the necessities and limitations of nature, while at the same time attempting to mimic nature in technology and art. Nature is either seen as a complement or a counterpoint to culture. In a romanticized and classicized setting, nature becomes the place of gods, nymphs, fairies and elves, a place where pantheist religiosity has erected its temple, nature being associated with the positive sublime, a place promising revelation, vindication and revigorization for the human soul, an Emersonian setting invoking transcendence, or a Rousseauvian place like the Walden pond offering refuge to those plagued by the miracles of modernity.

Nature, however, also figures as the dark and mystic place, a site where errands into the wilderness lead to encounters with witchcraft, fierce animals or warring aboriginals, with mystic forces of unknown dimensions, or simply the forces of nature dwarfing the so-called human spirit. The negative sublime, in whose grasp awe and mystery lead to a mixture of fearful submission and angst, can break down the meticulously arranged façades of civilization, be it within the walls of the House of Usher, on board the whaler Pequot, or en route on a river leading into the heart of darkness. "The wilderness masters the colonist", not vice versa: At the frontier - be it physical or spiritual - and underneath the masks of civilization and science breaks through what cannot be explained, that which cannot be named; names that cannot be spoken for both the context and the understanding are missing.

Images already found within the American Renaissance and the Romantic era, the home to everything gothic and mystical, are also recurring within popular culture, be it the Alien series, Twin Peaks, Farscape or The X-Files. In an age increasingly marked by the reign of technology and information culture, the dichotomy of nature and culture is reinstated, nature and biology appearing as powerful and haunting entities questioning the very edifice of civilization, challenging the tomes of human knowledge and turning an often naïve dream into a nightmare. Furthermore, this dichotomy being translated into the fabric of society, the without facing the within, it increasingly turns the Renaissance world of bright, heroic masculinity and soft, submissive femininity upside down, contrasting the dark, mysterious side of images reminiscent of feminine stereotypes with an increasing incidence of female heroes, often portraying a shift, if not a complete reversal of gender roles, creating male characters carrying female attributes, and female characters conquering a formerly male world of pathos and heros, moving the frontier constituted by nature into the realms of culture, challenging truths and norms formally accepted and cherished, confronting a wish-belief dream of a Pleasantville world with a reality more complex, more deviant and much less normal than usually dogmatically proclaimed.