Humanities and Arts
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Birgit Capelle
Birgit Capelle
Institution: University of Bonn; North American Studies Program; Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies;
Email: bcapell1@uni-bonn.de
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Doi: https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v2i2.93
2022-05-10This article explores the epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) by Gary Snyder and a Song/Chin dynasty Chinese landscape painting. I illustrate how the poem and the painting, together with Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), form a complex web of intertextual and intermedial references. All four works, I argue, tell similar narratives of spiritual journey and paths through mountain and river landscapes; all four speak of moments of heightened awareness in the sense of Buddhist “no-mind” (Chinese: wu-shin; Japanese: mushin). I show how they converge in exhibiting ontologies of non-substantiality, emptiness, and becoming. Taking the philosophies of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as a theoretical frame, I argue that the American transcendentalist and Beat works poetically and narratively convey relational rather than substantialist views of Being and life. They depict the world as a dynamic and open field of tension between two non-oppositional forces from which we as subjects are not essentially separate in a dualistic way. I substantiate my argument by drawing on the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who refers to the Chinese understanding of landscape (“mountains and waters”) in his critical treatment of (European) philosophy’s centuries-long subject-centered epistemology and substantialist “ontology of Being.”
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2022 May | 44 | 44 |
Total | 1074 | 1074 |
Show by month | Manuscript | Video Summary |
---|---|---|
2024 September | 2 | 2 |
2024 August | 37 | 37 |
2024 July | 41 | 41 |
2024 June | 30 | 30 |
2024 May | 40 | 40 |
2024 April | 51 | 51 |
2024 March | 50 | 50 |
2024 February | 26 | 26 |
2024 January | 22 | 22 |
2023 December | 40 | 40 |
2023 November | 53 | 53 |
2023 October | 24 | 24 |
2023 September | 24 | 24 |
2023 August | 20 | 20 |
2023 July | 23 | 23 |
2023 June | 24 | 24 |
2023 May | 39 | 39 |
2023 April | 34 | 34 |
2023 March | 51 | 51 |
2023 February | 2 | 2 |
2023 January | 4 | 4 |
2022 December | 33 | 33 |
2022 November | 73 | 73 |
2022 October | 54 | 54 |
2022 September | 36 | 36 |
2022 August | 50 | 50 |
2022 July | 52 | 52 |
2022 June | 95 | 95 |
2022 May | 44 | 44 |
Total | 1074 | 1074 |