Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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Studenti
English

Publikace detail

‘And Where is Your Landscape?’ - the Landguage of W. H. Auden’s Travel Writing

Autoři: Vít Ladislav

Rok: 2024

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	‘And Where is Your Landscape?’ - the Landguage of W. H. Auden’s Travel Writing	In 1936, W. H. Auden visited Iceland, one of his “sacred” heartlands, the landscape of which intrigued his topophilic sensibility already in childhood. With Louis MacNeice, Auden explored the island, gathering material for a travel book commissioned by Faber and Faber. This gave him the opportunity to express his topophilic sentiments for his “holy land” and treat it as a unique place bestowed with, as he put it, “the most magical light of anywhere on earth.” However, the undertaking also compelled Auden, who had no experience of travel writing, to contemplate the stylistic intricacies of the genre, its traditions, and diverse approaches to engaging with places. This presentation aims to explore what Sten P. Moslund terms landguage – the imaginative dynamic which drives the production of places and their landscapes in language. Through this lens, I show how the verse parts of Letters from Iceland can be interpreted not as attempts to capture Iceland’s genius loci, but rather as a series of reflections on the process of translating the experience of landscape into written form. The presentation approaches Auden as a consciously formalist poet who compares poetry, prose, painting, and photography to evaluate the capacities of various art forms to convey local distinctiveness and subjective experience of a place. I show that Auden tends to eclipse attention to local specificity with a meta-poetic debate with other genres, writers, and the tradition of travel writing to contend that poetry, while a powerful vehicle for expression, is inherently ill-equipped to celebrate local uniqueness.	travel writing; Auden; landscape