The Pleasures of Simulacra: Rethinking the Picturesque in Coleridge’s Notebooks and ‘The Picture; or, The Lover’s Resolution'.

Abstract

Argues that in their writings on the picturesque, Coleridge and other nineteenth-century tourists enjoy an unsettling and energizing process of interchange between viewer and landscape; their interactions with nature and enjoyment of its pleasures challenge critics’ claims that the picturesque is a reductive experience of landscape, and that a disciplinary structure regiments the picturesque traveler. Claims Coleridge’s prose and his poem “The Picture” demonstrate that such claims fail to account for the volatile elements of picturesque. Notes that tourists’ reception of landscape is not necessarily as regulated or as superficial as recent accounts would have it. Believes picturesque instability and irregularity challenge the viewer to confront assumptions and judgments. Believes picturesque tourists discovered what postmodernism has more recently emphasized: that the copy and the original do not exist in a simple and hierarchical binary opposition. Concludes art and nature cannot be taxonomized according to a clear hierarchy or etiology, but that affiliations between them can only be continually recalibrated as orthodox notions of what constitutes an origin are revised and nature and art alike enter the realm of the simulacra.