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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Dorothee E. Kocks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xx + 255 pages.
With Dream a Little, Dorothee E. Kocks has made a thought-provoking and ambitious contribution to the growing body of work on landscape and American culture. Successfully integrating literary and historical material, she explores the way land has functioned as the foundation of American ideals of social justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Landscapes, Kocks points out, have consistently served as a starting point for "the exploration of the good society" in a wide variety of times and places (34). "The habit of turning to the hills, to the plains, to the mountaintops and riverbanks for answers to life's most troublesome questions is an ancient one" (33), she asserts. In Dream a Little, she seeks to examine how landscapes have served this function in the United States during the past two centuries.
The central premise of her discussion is the astute observation that "land's seemingly natural properties obliterate the political and economic background of choices made and choices left behind" (20). The most provocative element of her argument, however, is a corollary to that claim. Kocks suggests that, instead of resisting or merely analyzing "the geographic embrace" (the name that she gives "the tradition of using landscapes to reveal and elaborate our dreams for social justice"), we should "lean into it" (4).
At the heart of her work is a deeply held belief in humanity's need for myth and in the value of symbolic landscapes for both personal and communal decision-making, as well as a devout hope that such beliefs need not be incompatible with scholarly inquiry. Kocks integrates her soul-searching on these matters (as well as a good deal of autobiographical material) into her rigorous, scholarly analyses, and the result is a book that in many ways is neither fish nor fowl. I suspect that...
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