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Social Science Human Geography

Landscapes of the Mind

Worlds of Sense and Metaphor

by (author) J. Douglas Porteous

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1990
Category
Human Geography, Cultural, General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487579548
    Publish Date
    Dec 1990
    List Price
    $35.95

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Description

A landscape is a visual perception, the way in which we experience our environment through our eyes. In this provocative book Douglas Porteous ventures far beyond the visual into the myriad other sensory and existential perceptions -- otherscapes -- through which we encounter the worlds around and within us.

 

Part I, Sensuous Worlds, investigates and celebrates the problems and joys of Smellscape and Soundscape. These interpretations accumulate in the pivotal essay on Bodyscape. Part II, Landscapes of Metaphor, delves more deeply into the existential landscape antinomies of human life: body (Bodyscape), vs mind (Inscape); home (Homescape) vs. travel (Escape); and, mirroring the sequence of urbanization, rural childhood (Childscape) vs. urban Adulthood (Deathscape). Rarely considered as an interconnected sequence, these 'scape studies serve to illuminate, interpret, and critique the human condition in that we are pleased to call Western 'civilization.'

 

Porteous draws from a remarkably wide array of sources -- the modern novel (particularly the works of Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry), poetry, travel literature, geography, psychology, urban design, and environmental aesthetics -- and adds specially commissioned line-drawings by Ole Heggen. The result is an extraordinary work, interdisciplinary in scope, non-technical in language, written with authority and passion.

About the author

J. Douglas Porteous is Professor of Geography at the Unviersity of Victoria. He is the author of numerous other books, including The Modernization of Easter Island; and Planned to Death: The Annihilation of a Place called Howdendyke.

J. Douglas Porteous' profile page